


The Darkness Of A Night

by Krasimer



Series: Laughter In The Night [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Assumptions, Attempted Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Conspiracy, Deidara is a Little Shit, Detectives, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Magic-Users, Missing Persons, Murderers, Near Death Experiences, Recovered Memories, Repressed Memories, Sasori is an asshole at first, Trauma, Vampire Detective, Vampire/Werewolf Relationship, Vampires, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-23 01:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 24,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17070965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: There was a chill in the air the night he found the werewolf.The people of the little town on the other side of the forest had come and gotten him, begged him to retrieve the monster that had been terrorizing the town for a few weeks. He suspected, of course, that terrorizing in this instance meant, ‘bothered’, because there hadn’t been any major property damage or injuries to the people living in town.





	1. Fangs and Fur

There was a chill in the air the night he found it.

For once, he could actually see his breath, in spite of how little heat he actually generated. The forest around him was dark and silent, though not as empty as it would seem from a single glance. Humans wouldn’t have been able to tell, wouldn’t have known, but he knew.

The thin trail of blood was like a trail of spotlights, to him.

The bushes were bent down, cracked and ripped in places, and he followed the trail to its end, stopping in front of what had once been a small hollow housing a deer and her babies. The mass of matted fur was curled up in the back, so drenched in blood that the original color couldn’t show through. Half of the mats must have been dried blood, from what he could tell.

Wrapped around its neck was a trail of silver, a hunting line that had been tossed around it before it had gotten away.

He crouched down before the creature could wake up and put a hand over its muzzle, shushing it gently when a burningly-blue eye snapped open. With his other hand, he pulled out the syringe that he’d been keeping in his pocket, biting the cap off and injecting the liquid inside into the loose skin of the creature’s ruff.

There was a small movement from the creature, a token struggle, but he ignored it and held it still as he pulled the silver off.

There was a chill in the air the night he found the werewolf.

 

It really was a pitiful creature, he thought as he settled the mass of unconscious fur on the floor in front of the fire.

Well within the binding spell he’d carefully etched on the ground for such a purpose, of course. The people of the little town on the other side of the forest had come and gotten him, begged him to retrieve the monster that had been terrorizing the town for a few weeks. He suspected, of course, that terrorizing in this instance meant, ‘ _bothered_ ’, because there hadn’t been any major property damage or injuries to the people living in town.

From the looks and weight of the thing, it had probably been living exclusively off of what could be scavenged from the trash.

By the fire, behind him, there was the sound of a growl quickly growing in volume. Already bored, he turned towards the noise and narrowed his eyes. “Are you going to be this noisy all night long?” he asked the blood-covered creature. “I’ve run into werewolves before, none of the others have been.”

The growling stopped.

Intimidation failed.

He almost smiled, stopping himself before he did. “My name is Akasuna Sasori.” He put a hand to his chest. “You, werewolf, were considered a threat to the town. The people in the town paid me to remove you as a problem. Sometimes that means relocating you, sometimes that means ending your life. Are you the former or the latter?”

The werewolf seemed to think over the question for a minute before peeling back it’s lip and baring its teeth, the fangs glinting in the firelight.

“Fair enough,” Sasori sighed and moved a little closer. “One tail wag for yes, two for no.”

Another growl sounded, this time more reproachful than anything else. It was not often that he stooped low enough to make dog jokes about the werewolves he handled, but sometimes he had to amuse himself. “Are you aware of what is happening, right now?” he asked instead of changing the system.

The werewolf glared at him for a minute before, very deliberately, letting its tail wag just once.

“Are you going to bite me if I reach to touch you?”

Three wags.

Sasori felt the urge to dump the wolf back into the woods. “If I try to clean the blood off of you,” he clarified. “Are you going to bite me?”

Slowly, the wolf’s tail wagged twice.

“Very good,” Sasori stepped back, still watching the werewolf. It sat placidly on the floor, nosing at the difference between the tiles and the carpet. When it didn’t react other than to look at him, he nodded and turned. The trip up the stairs was quick and the washing tub was easily found.

When he brought it back to the fireplace, the werewolf stood up on shaky legs and stepped closer. As he had thought earlier, it only had one eye. Whether or not that had been an injury before the person they had been stopped being human, he couldn’t tell. “I am going to fill this with hot water,” he told the werewolf. “And then I am going to have you get into it one way or another. If that means I have to pick you up, there will be a problem.”

The wolf ignored him and sat down next to the tub, one of its hind legs bent at an odd angle. From the slight swelling in the limb and the way the wolf avoided putting weight on it, Sasori could tell it was freshly injured.

“I can make an exception for injuries,” he told it.

The werewolf yipped quietly, putting its head on the padded rim of the washing tub. It sat there while he made a couple of trips back and forth from the kitchen, filling the tub about halfway full. Next, he retrieved the shampoo and soap from where he kept them for this particular task.

Normally, he would lend whatever werewolf was in his house the tub and such to wash themselves. Normally, they would have turned back while under the effects of the sedation. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t be signing up to start a dog-wash. Sasori frowned as he watched the werewolf continue to move on a shaking frame that seemed too thin to survive for much longer without help.

This was clearly not going to be ordinary.

The others of his Grouping were going to mock him mercilessly. Itachi in particular, amused in his own sardonic and mostly silent way. A werewolf that had altered Sasori’s very careful system, how odd.

Something was off about the situation.

Werewolves only tended to stubbornly stay in their furred shape if they felt stressed to the point of panic. That this one was…It worried him. Ignoring his thoughts, for now, Sasori leaned down and gently picked the wolf up, settling it in the tub. There was a gentle whine as its feet touched the water and Sasori shushed it, continuing until the whole body was in.

Even with the whole werewolf in it, the water only rose to three-fourths of the tub. The werewolf was lanky and stick-thin, sharp edges poking out from under the matted fur.

“I am going to pour water over your head,” he told it. “Close your eye.”

He began scooping gentle handfuls of water over the mass of blood-matted fur, doing his best to keep it out of the werewolf’s eye. With a little bit of scrubbing, the fur beneath was revealed to be a blond color, almost golden. “You’re a mess,” he told the werewolf, receiving a snort in response. “And you are going to have to change back at some point.”

Under his hands, it’s entire body went stiff, the acrid scent of fear filling the room.

“There has to be a reason, then,” Sasori nodded, pouring some shampoo into his hand. With careful fingers, he began rubbing it into the bloodied fur, watching as rust-red and dead-brown flowed around his fingers in the suds. “Someone attacked you or something scared you or something is following you.” He pinched his lips together, feeling the thick line of a scar under his fingers.

The more he shampooed the werewolf, the more lines of scarring he found. Something had attacked the creature and he could only hope it was after they had become a werewolf, not when they were still human.

“I have to get a brush, I think,” Sasori stood up from where he had been kneeling and shook his hands off briefly. “Stay here, I will be right back.”

Ordinarily, the werewolf would be washing themselves off by this point, accepting clothes and discussing options to get relocated.

Or he would have already snapped their neck and moved on, if they were of the variety that was unable to be saved. The ones that had gone so far past humanity that they could no longer remember how it felt, those were the dangerous ones. There was a handful of graves on the edge of his property, after all, and he kept the nearby towns safe from the ones who could not distinguish friend from foe any longer.

They kept him well-stocked with blood.

By the time he came back with the array of scrubbing brushes, he was almost surprised to see a human-shaped being in the tub.

The young man was just as thin as his wolf form had been, Sasori could count his ribs, and his hair was still a bloodied and matted mess. The lines of scarring he’d felt were clearly visible now, stretching at awful angles across his chest and shoulders, dragging down to his stomach. The rest of him was obscured by the blood-tainted water and he looked exhausted.

Just as he was beginning to wonder why he hadn’t heard the man make any noise, he realized that the man was unconscious again.

Exhausted.

More than just looking it, he was beyond the realm of wakefulness. The transformation back to human-shape had knocked him out, probably leaving him in pain. Ignoring his annoyance for now, Sasori knelt back down and continued scrubbing the blood out of his hair and off of his skin. Comfort would go a long way towards reminding someone how human they were.

It took nearly another hour, but he finally managed to get enough blood and dirt off of the man to be able to see the freckles that were scattered across the bridge of his nose.

Before he could brush the now-clean hair off of his face and see his other eye, Sasori was suddenly aware of a hand wrapped around his wrist. That singular blue eye looked almost feral as it narrowed on Sasori again, this time without the help of a wolfish skeletal structure. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he tamped down on the urge to roll his eyes.

The other man took a couple of deep breaths, then nodded slowly. “I think I know you,” he made a soft noise after he finished his sentence, a gentle gulp of air after the words. It came out sounding something like a speech impediment, a little gasp of noise. Sasori blinked a couple of times, then nodded.

“If you’ve been in the town at all, then you probably do,” he told the werewolf. “Do you remember your name?”

“De—” the man cut himself off, blinked a couple of times, then nodded. “Deidara. Stayed too long shifted, started forgetting.”

“Do you know why you stayed shifted for so long?” Sasori felt a flicker of worry in his chest. “If there is danger in the area, the humans need to know.” He watched as an emotion he thought might be concern and then realization and relief flashed across Deidara’s face. “What?”

“You’re not human,” Deidara grinned, suddenly a lot more upbeat than he had been. “I was wondering if my nose was broken,” there came the noise again, Sasori firmly slotting the knowledge of it into the category of speech impediment. It happened after every full sentence Deidara said, like he couldn’t control it.

The silver line that had been around Deidara’s neck had left a ring of dark red bruising, like blood poured directly on his skin.

“You’re—Why would your nose be _broken?_ ”

“Because you didn’t smell like a human,” Deidara shrugged, his sentences quickly rambling off. “You looked human, so obviously you might have had to be one! Of course, that was excluding the possibility of you being one of the ones that look human, but I’ve smelled most of those before. Shifters tend to smell like sulfur, ghouls smell like the dust after rain, and you didn’t look like you had any of the tells of the others you might have been, so…”

“I am a vampire, you _uncultured brat!_ ”

For a moment, Sasori thought that Deidara would be cowed into silence. Be humble, be apologetic, anything other than what he got.

Which was, against all odds, Deidara _laughing in his face._

Deidara laughed until he had to wrap his arms around his ribs, still entirely too thin and frail looking for the sound that was coming out of him. “Do you _often_ say shit like that?” he cackled around the words and Sasori felt his hands clenching into fists, his nails going sharp. “’Cause if you do, I may just _stay!_ ” he shrieked out a laugh.

“Awfully bold words from someone sitting, naked, in a tub full of bloody water.” Sasori’s lip curled back, his eyes narrowing. “Did you want clothes or not?”

“Oh,” Deidara managed to calm down, his laughter only bubbling out every few words or so. “Yeah.”

Taking as deep a breath as he could, Sasori turned away and grabbed the plastic-wrapped clothing he had brought down with the other things for the bath. “Is your leg still hurting?” he distracted them both with the question, ignoring how quickly Deidara’s eye shifted from bright and amused to stormy and dark.

For some reason, it tugged at something inside of him, yanking fiercely at his heart.

“A little, yeah,” Deidara lifted it above the edge of the tub, resting the back of his knee on the padding. There was a line of heavy bruising along his thigh, the bulge of a bone out of place in his ankle. “I don’t…I don’t remember what happened to it, yeah.” He gestured uselessly at it, hesitating before he put his palm on his kneecap. “I was running from something.”

“Tell me if you do remember,” Sasori put both of his hands on Deidara’s ankle. “This is going to hurt.”

“What is— _fuck!”_

It hadn’t been broken, just popped horribly out of place.

The water sloshed around as Deidara curled up around his other leg, his hands clenched around his thigh. The only thing keeping him from being completely exposed in front of Sasori was the water lapping around his waist. “It’s back in place, now,” he told the werewolf.

Deidara continued to grit his teeth, biting at his knee as he tried to avoid screaming. Once he could make his teeth separate from his skin, he jerked his head up and narrowed his eye at Sasori. “You’re an asshole,” he snarled the words out.

“If you get out of the tub, you can take an actual shower,” Sasori bargained instead of responding to the insult. He’d been called worse, often, by Hidan.

With a pleased hum, Deidara drew his no-longer-useless leg back into the tub and stood up on shaking legs. Like many of the werewolves that Sasori had dealt with before, he seemed uncaring about his nudity, clambering over the edge of the tub and standing on the tile next to the fireplace. “If you don’t want me dripping on the floor, I’ll need a towel, yeah.”

Maybe not so much a speech impediment as it was a compulsive habit. He’d have to ask Itachi about it.

Of course, that also meant admitting that he wanted to learn about a werewolf who he was, it seemed, _going to let stay in his house._ As long as there was a threat to the people who supplied him with blood, he needed Deidara to stay around and tell him as much as he could. There was a binding between them, thin and tenuous, but it was there.

Itachi and Hidan would _never_ let him live it down if he so much as admitted to having allowed the werewolf to use his shower. Usually, he gave the werewolves he was helping and relocating enough money to get a room somewhere, sometimes a small apartment.  In particular, Itachi would give him that narrowed-eye, one eyebrow just barely tilted up, radiating smugness expression that was a shade different from his normal indifferent expression. Hidan would laugh in his face and insult him again, but Itachi would study his every movement and judge based on what he saw.

Sasori turned and grabbed a towel out of the basket of laundry he’d been meaning to fold and put away.

He had gotten distracted, one of the townspeople had given him a call and told him about a werewolf that had been wandering around the forest-side edge of town for a week or two. It had apparently snapped at several small children and chased after someone.

Tossing the towel at Deidara, he motioned for him to follow. “The bathroom is this way,” he explained.

Deidara padded after him, wrapping the towel around his body like a blanket. With a twist of his wrist, his hair was pulled into a still-wet but compact tail inside the towel, avoiding blood-tinted drops of water on the floor. “Thanks, yeah,” he muttered.

The sudden change in demeanor, back to the quiet he’d first been faced with, left Sasori off-balance.

Something about the way Deidara carried himself was worrying, like a child scared of retaliation. From physical clues, he’d guess that the werewolf was around twenty years old, as compared to his several centuries.

Or his thirty-five years, if one were to go by the age he’d been when he’d been turned.

There was something off about the werewolf, was the thing he eventually settled on. Something that made his hackles rise and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

He felt like he’d missed something.


	2. Laugh To Keep From Screaming

The bathroom was _warm._

The bath had been almost too hot, pleasant but meant for scrubbing off the worst of the dirt and the blood. The shower was about comfort, cleanliness without worrying about clogging a drain. Deidara dropped the towel on the toilet seat with barely a backwards glance. The floor beneath his feet was warm as well, like Sasori had bothered to get heated flooring installed.

“How old are you, yeah?” Deidara found himself asking as he settled into the shower, turning the water slowly higher. His favorite showers had always been the kind that left him looking like a cooked lobster at the end of them.

Every single time his speech pattern revealed itself, he wanted to scream just a little more.

He’d gone to speech therapy as a child, he’d thought he’d gotten rid of it, and then he’d spent a handful of years out of the company of anyone who’d wanted or needed to hear his voice. He’d managed to make it a nasal sort of sigh for _years_ , but apparently being alone for so long had brought the stupid little ‘ _yeah_ ’ at the end of his sentences right on back.

He remembered that.

“I’ve been around for something like six hundred years,” Sasori leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “How old are you?”

“Uh…” Deidara looked over his shoulder at the vampire, then grinned. “What’s the date today?” he paused, then looked down at his feet. “…And the year?”

“You don’t _know?”_

Sasori’s outrage was almost as funny as his pompous way of announcing his species. “You spend enough time alone, you tend to forget, yeah.” Deidara shrugged, turning his head back towards the shower. The silence after his words made him want to wince at his awkwardness, how off-putting he must seem to Sasori.

To everyone, really.

He’d never really been a favorite in anything. Not for anyone, not that he could remember.

What little he could remember had been enough to convince him not to try to remember any more than that.

“…Do you remember anything about the forest, before I found you there?” Sasori’s voice was calmer than it had been just a few seconds ago. Deidara’s upper lip curled back in a silent snarl before he forced himself to calm down. The pity he was imagining in the vampire’s voice was just that – imagined. “You said you were running from something.”

“Something attacked me,” Deidara raised his voice to be heard over the sound of the shower stream hitting the tiled surfaces of the stall. “I remember heat and I remember fear.” He grabbed the bar of soap he saw sitting in a little dish next to the controls for the shower. “There’s a washcloth?” he asked next, pressing his thumb into the bar to help reassure him that he was awake.

The small cloth landing on his head helped with that, in a way.

“Thanks, yeah!”

He lathered up the cloth and began scrubbing at every inch of his skin, probably rubbing it raw and taking off several layers. When Sasori’s voice came again, Deidara startled a little. “What’s the last age you remember being?”

That was definitely an easier question.

“Nineteen,” Deidara called back. “I think that was a couple of years ago, though. I’ve been in wolf-shaped-Deidara form for a _long_ time, don’t remember, yeah.” He scrubbed particularly hard at a stubborn patch of dirt on his inner thigh, leaving it stinging but clean.

“We can talk more about this tomorrow, if you would like,” Sasori seemed to hesitate for a second, like he was trying to decide for or against something. Deidara suspected that the vampire wasn’t used to being unsure what he was doing. “I will be back in a few minutes, I am going to go get some clothing for you to sleep in.”

Before Deidara could say anything to that, Sasori had slipped out the now-open door and down the hallway.

With a deep breath, feeling the heat and steam in his throat, Deidara grabbed the bottle of shampoo and squirted a decent sized dollop into his hand. Scrubbing it into his hair felt not quite as good as when Sasori had done the same to his fur, but he could live with it. That had been a deep-scrub, intended to get the blood out and off.

This was, again, about comfort and cleanliness.

He was deeply aware that it would leave him soon enough. He’d be put back outside again soon, Sasori having gotten the information he needed. The vampire didn’t strike him as the type to keep people around once they had stopped being useful. He also didn’t seem likely to put up with time-wasting.

Deidara would just have to tell him everything he knew and get it over with.

Like pulling a Band-Aid off.

One quick tug, rather than letting the thing stick and pull at each and every little hair. There was something about Sasori that seemed familiar, something that made him want to stay a little bit longer, but he knew he was probably already pressing his luck.

Shoving his head back into the water, Deidara closed his eye and let the shower drum against the back of his neck.

What he remembered was…

Blurry.

Fear, mostly, running away from something dangerous and bigger than him. Sasori should probably know about that, should probably be aware of the monster Deidara could remember. Teeth and eyes, bright and big, loud and nightmare-inducing.

A pain around his neck, a bigger pain in his leg with every step he took.

People, off in the distance. His memories blurred at the edges as he tried to remember anything else about them, which seemed to mean that he hadn’t gotten any more information about them than that. Sasori had mentioned a werewolf being at the edges of the town and he supposed that might have been him, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember.

Without meaning to, he let himself think about what had come before.

About what had happened before he’d had the option for four legs and fur, fangs and a tail. About the pain and the screaming and the way his own guts had been snapped up by teeth and ripped apart by claws.

About the way he’d been turned into a werewolf.

The way the cemetery had looked with a new headstone, a soft grey rock with his name inscribed on it. A monument to a death that should have happened, a burial without a body, a home he couldn’t go to anymore. With a growl that felt more like a whine, Deidara jerked his head to the side and clenched his teeth around his arm, biting down a little more to stifle the noise.

He didn’t need to think about that.

“I suspect these will be far too large on you,” Sasori’s voice came back, the tone of it quavering and uneven. “But they should do for now.”

“Thanks,” Deidara called back out of the shower, his hands clenching uselessly on the tile of the wall. “I’ll be out in a minute, yeah.”

He barely heard Sasori telling him to take his time, so wrapped up in forcing himself to think of _anything but that._ Think of the forest in the winter, the way Sasori had yanked the bone in his ankle back into place, the fact that the vampire had cleaned him like he was a child and seen him _naked_.

_Anything but his history._

Slowly, Deidara managed to get his breathing back under control, calming his wildly pounding heart.

A flash of teeth lunging towards him made his breath catch in his throat again, threatening a panic attack in the middle of a stranger-who-was-a-vampire’s bathroom. Whatever had happened to him, past, present, the initial turning or the recent attack and cause of his fear, it could happen later, he could recount it later. With a quiet snarl, Deidara dragged his clawed fingers across the back of his own neck, taking the sting of pain and focusing on it.

This was reality.

He was sure of it, this time.

A stranger in the forest, one who had found him and held him and drugged him with something, that had been Sasori. That had actually happened, was a part of reality as others knew it. The scent he could now identify as ‘vampire’ wrapped around him, meaning safety for the moment.

If he pissed Sasori off enough, who knew what it would mean in the future.

For now, it meant safety.

It meant warmth and clothes and human-shaped bodies, it meant things he hadn’t had for a long time. A long chunk of indeterminate time had passed him by, leaving him in its wake. Stick close to the things that kept you safe, that was the lesson he’d had drilled into him by the life he’d been living. A vampire wasn’t the worst thing to happen, especially when it was one as socialized to be polite as Sasori was.

Deidara could sense a temper under there, a streak of wildness that he almost wanted to tug at until Sasori revealed the width and breadth of it.

He could do this, he told himself as he shut off the taps and squeezed the excess water out of his hair. The towel was where he’d left it and he used it to gently ruffle his hair, drying it a little more. His body was easier, a quick wipe down of the remaining droplets of water before he slung the towel over the glass door of the shower.

Sasori had been right.

The clothing was sized at least four sizes too big for him, the pants thankfully coming with a tight-cinching drawstring. Despite the size, or maybe because of it, they were comfortable and warm.

Still barefoot, Deidara padded back out of the bathroom and towards where he could hear Sasori moving around.

Might as well get it over with, rip the bandage off.

Oh, this was not going to be fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I mention that Deidara is not going to have a fun time in this story?


	3. Remembrance

_‘You spend enough time alone, you tend to forget, yeah.’_

Sasori clutched at his chest, over his heart, ignoring the fact that he was wrinkling one of his favorite shirts. Deidara had, without even meaning to, summed up how practically his entire life had gone. The werewolf had been something confusing, intriguing in a way that had bothered Sasori.

And then he had gone and said something that had hit far too close to home.

The werewolf probably had no idea how much what he’d said had effected Sasori. The wrenching loneliness in his voice had been painful, reminding him of everything he’d ever lost. Of all the time that had passed, the years he had spent alone and miserable. He was one of the oldest in the Grouping, one of the ones with the most years gathered behind him.

What Deidara said had rung true for him as well.

With a shake of his head, Sasori forced himself to keep moving, up the stairs, grab the clothes he kept in sizes suitable for every werewolf he’d come across, bring them back down. Deidara would be utterly swamped in the excess fabric, thin as he was.

The idea of cooking something for the werewolf to eat crossed his mind, but he put it aside for the moment. There was still some talking to do between them and he didn’t know how long Deidara would want to be in the shower. For some reason, he didn’t like the idea of forcing the werewolf out, preferring to leave him in the hot water and with the array of soaps and shampoos. It might have been the loneliness he could hear echoed in the werewolf, the same that coursed through him.

It might have been that Deidara could only remember being nineteen the last time he’d been aware of the passage of time.

The slipping away of time, when it came to werewolves, usually only came about as a result of staying in their four-legged form too long. It meant that Deidara had likely spent a couple of _years_ in his wolf form, which was concerning to say the least. Staying shifted that long could have detrimental health effects, both physical and mental. Surprisingly, Deidara seemed mostly coherent, sane and aware of the world around him.

Might also explain the speech impediment, or compulsion, or whatever it was.

Things like that tended to be the first things gone if a werewolf spent too long in their shifted form. Four legs and a tail made it easier to forget they’d once been human. Add in how long Deidara seemed to have spent in that state, it made it easy to see how he would have dropped control over something like that. When you didn’t have anyone to talk to, language was the first thing to go.

Sasori had once had to relearn how to speak English after spending thirty years alone.

He’d kept slipping back into his native languages, the ones his parents had taught him when he had been growing up. Japanese and a language from a small country that no longer existed; his grandmother had been the last native speaker to die.

The clothes in his hands, he headed back down to the bathroom Deidara was in.

“I suspect these will be far too large on you,” he called out as he entered, forcing his memories down and pushing them back. If he drowned them, maybe they would stay away. “But they should do for now.”

“Thanks,” Deidara called back out. “I’ll be out in a minute, yeah.”

“Take your time,” Sasori found himself saying. “Take as long as you want, I am not trying to rush you.” Funnily enough, he found himself meaning it. “Come out when you’re done.”

Feeling like he was going to choke, Sasori turned on his heel and left the room after depositing the clothes on the counter. He hadn’t thought about his family in _years_ and in the course of one night, he had been reminded of them forcibly, as well as the crushing loneliness and silence that came with being immortal.

The last time either of the Uchihas had felt like this, there had been a three years long search for them. Itachi had gone off to hide somewhere, Sasuke had just…Disappeared. They had been able to find Itachi, but Sasuke had been left to return on his own.

Itachi had panicked about his little brother for a period of time after that. If they had been human, it would have been classified as a long time.

Vampires counted the passage of time differently.

An age could pass for humanity and vampires would simply wonder if they had blinked. Or perhaps napped. Humanity could rise and fall, eras could pass, countries and states and entire _empires_ could disappear in the time a human would call an eternity and a vampire would simply scoff and roll their eyes.

Like the way humans forgot how long ago something had happened, claiming it had just been a week or two when it had been several months.

He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had lost contact with what remained of his family.

His little cousins had been turned to keep their brother company – demon vessels tended to gain immortality as a side-effect of the demon inside of them. The youngest of his cousins had been unstable, the last time he had seen him. Gaara’s brother and sister had volunteered to keep him company, had gotten turned for the sake of making sure he had someone to return to.

Sasori didn’t know where they were, anymore. Didn’t even know if the three of them were still alive.

He hoped they were.

Sitting down on the couch, Sasori looked into the heart of the fire for a while, his hands clasped between his knees. Gaara had looked the most like him of the three siblings, had been one of the few connections to the remains of his family. His father and theirs had been brothers, one of them good and kind when he had been alive.

It had been an honor, of sorts, to kill his uncle in the end.

There had been someone helping him, a naga that he didn’t remember the name of at the moment, but he had been the one to kill his uncle. Gaara had been so little at the time, traumatized by the death of his mother’s brother at his own hands, and Sasori had taken the demon vessel from his first home and found his siblings.

He had been the one to turn them.

Dragging himself out of his memories, Sasori looked up to see Deidara walking back into the room. He no longer smelled like blood, his hair still somewhat damp but entirely clean. Between the bath and the shower, he had scrubbed off enough dirt and grime to expose the natural tan of his skin, his eye bright blue and almost glowing. There was something about his scent that Sasori couldn’t parse. If he’d had a werewolf’s scenting ability, he would have been able to tell, but even without it, he knew that there was something more supernatural about Deidara than most wolves.

“You look like you’re in a better mood,” he crossed his arms over his chest, watching as the blond moved towards the fire and crouched down. “Do you have anything you can tell me about why you had a hunting line around your neck?”

“They said something to you about a werewolf being too close, yeah?” Deidara turned to look at him, his hands held out towards the fire. Now that he was moving his hands, Sasori could see the thick, knotted lines of scarring across his palms. “I don’t think it was me. I remember attacking someone, but not…Not a human, yeah.” He shook his head, his hair moving in a thick curtain. Clean and straightened, it went down to his waist, providing a veritable wall for him to hide behind.

“There were reports of a werewolf coming to close to the town,” Sasori shifted his stance, watching as Deidara’s gaze snapped towards his feet. The werewolf was obviously used to defending himself, to watching the movements of everything around him and deciding actions based on that.

Sasori frowned, upping the time he estimated Deidara had been in shifted form.

He had known one wolf to stay in shifted form for three years, but that had been the longest he had ever heard of. Anything more than that tended to end with the wolf either being put down after attacking people or with the wolf dying once they were forced to shift back.

Deidara acted like he had stayed shifted for closer to the three-year mark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are we're back again...


	4. Memories Are Scars

He could remember another werewolf.

A pair of them, actually. There were very few details that he remembered, but he knew that much. His memories of being shifted were hazy, like he was trying to look through murky water. “Do you have a spell, yeah?” he paused, then nodded. “Or a spellcaster? I don’t—” he shook his head, covering his face and trying to will his instincts down. “My memories aren’t clear. There is something difficult about remembering.” Looking between his fingers, he watched Sasori.

Sasori looked almost startled that he had asked. “You’re willing to undergo memory-related spells?”

“Yeah,” Deidara nodded, still covering most of his face. “ _Yeah_.” He stood up straight again, still awkwardly hobbling around on his injured ankle. Back in place didn’t mean completely pain-free and he winced with every step he took. “I need to know,” he squeaked as Sasori nudged him towards the couch. “I need to know if I attacked people, yeah.”

“That is understandable,” Sasori crouched down in front of him. “Is there anything you _can_ tell me right now? Anything to start with?”

“Two werewolves,” Deidara frowned, squeezing his eye shut as he tried to remember. “And…”

His head felt stuffed with cotton.

Something was blocking his memories and he didn’t know what it was. There was nothing more unnerving than being unable to remember what had happened in the past couple of years, especially since it was the events relating directly to him. He shoved both of his hands up, burying them in his hair. His hair was so much longer than he remembered it being, coming down in a messy tangle around his head. The length of it translated to longer fur in his shifted form and if he was going back to that soon, there was no reason to cut it off.

Winter was coming soon. Cutting his hair would contribute to a faster death.

Once he was aware of it, he couldn’t ignore the discomforts of his body. Besides the ankle, there was a low-grade ache all over his body, his limbs trembling as his stomach growled. Deidara was barely aware of it as Sasori left the room, too intent on trying to remember.

_What had happened to him?_

He remembered how he had become a werewolf. That had been a shitshow of a time, full of pain and blood and misery, he didn’t like remembering that. He had a feeling, however, that the memories he was trying to pull out were connected to it.

The worst time of his life was connected to the memories he couldn’t grab.

Deidara snarled, yanking at his hair. If he could just _remember_ , he would feel so much better!

“Here,” a hand reached out in front of him, grabbing his wrist. Deidara went still as Sasori held on to him. “You’ll probably feel better if you eat something. You’re too thin.” He leaned back when Deidara took the plate he offered, a muffin of some kind surrounded by a handful of caramel candies. The food presented to him was so at odds with the vampire that Deidara almost laughed. Sasori must have picked up on his amusement as he rolled his eyes. “I have human guests occasionally. Feeding them is a courtesy, a matter of etiquette.”

“But,” Deidara gestured at the plate with his free hand. “A _muffin._ ”

“It has a couple of types of meats and cheeses in the middle,” Sasori nudged the edge of the plate towards him again. “Heated up for a minute while you were panicking. The caramels are so that you have calorie-dense things to eat – the other option was chocolate and that would not do so well with your digestive system.”

He drew back, actually sitting on the floor. “Eat all of that, then try to remember. You’ll do better.”

There was something about the way he was handling all of this that made Deidara think he was quietly a people-person of some kind. Like, before he had turned, he had been happy to be around others. Maybe not the most extroverted person in the world, but happy enough to be in the company of people he liked.

Deidara wondered how old he was. Earlier, he had said that he was over six-hundred but that could mean anything from six-hundred-and-one to at least a century over that marker.

How long had Sasori been alone?

Did he have a pack of vampires to belong to? There was another word for it when it was vampires, Deidara knew that. After a couple of seconds, he remembered it, even. A Grouping of vampires, like a Murder of Crows. Somehow, Deidara couldn’t picture him with a large family group to belong to – even if, buried under the grumpy behavior and the glare of brown-red eyes, he could see a person who liked people.

A small Grouping, then, if he had one.

Once he had finished the muffin and the caramels, Deidara looked back up at the fire. Something had occurred to him. “The two I saw in the woods,” he covered his face again. “I saw them the day I was turned. They were there.”

“What happened when you were turned?” Sasori shifted in his position.

“An entire pack of werewolves attacked me, yeah.” Deidara pinched his lips together. He didn’t want to talk about it – it had been undeniably the worst time of his life, full of pain and terror. “There was the two werewolves on the edge of everything, like they were waiting for something. There was—” his breath caught as the memory shifted into absolute clarity. There had been a man there, with dark eyes and an evil smile. When he had gestured, the two wolves waiting on the edge had run forward and taken part in attacking him. One of them had been the one to chew his left eye out of his face. “There was a man, there. I think…” he shook his head. “I think he was controlling them.”

When he looked up, Sasori had gone remarkably pale, even for a vampire. “What?”

“Controlling them,” Deidara nodded. “I think he was. They only came to bite me as well when he ordered them to.”

He kept the circumstances of him being turned to himself. He didn’t know how Sasori would react to it, but he was willing to bet it wouldn’t be good. The line of bruising on his neck seemed to throb for a moment, reminding him of the almost burned-in line of silver flecks there. “I don’t know what else happened in the woods, yeah. But,” he put a hand to his throat. “They were trying to attack people. I think I stopped them. Someone slipped a Hunter’s line around my neck.”

Sasori moved closer to him, shifting his hair out of the way. “This looks like it will heal decently,” he muttered. “It may scar.”

Based on what he knew his body looked like under the clothing he wore, Deidara laughed. “As long as I can still breath, yeah. Breathing is good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deidara is having a "Fun Time".


	5. Selfish Is Easy

Deidara had been staying with him for two months.

In that time, he had told Sasori about a number of things. The werewolf hadn’t been the most open about how he had become a werewolf, but that didn’t matter to Sasori. With werewolves still skirting around the town and the attacks getting bolder, he had to figure out how to stop it. Meetings with the others in his Grouping were almost useless – none of the others knew what was happening either.

And in some cases, they were just bothersome.

“Seriously,” Hidan leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “You still know fuck-all about what’s happening? You’re usually on top of these fucking things.” He practically dropped his mug on the table, making Sasori want to hit him.

“Yes,” Sasori leveled a glare at him. Hidan, as usual, didn’t seem to care. He was the youngest of the Grouping and the most recently acquired. They had picked him up somewhere along the line and Sasori hadn’t been able to convince himself to leave him where they found him. He had been the only survivor of his family, having been turned while the others had died. “I have a few clues as to what is happening, but I cannot offer much more than that. Whoever – whatever – is doing this, the tracks are being hidden entirely too well.”

From his place on the couch, Itachi looked up from his own mug, his eyes permanently red. Unlike Hidan, who had almost no difference in eye color when he switched but was still able to switch. “There are hints to be found?” he raised an eyebrow. “We have had no luck on our end,” he gestured at himself and his little brother.

Sasuke nodded when Sasori looked at him, huffing and blowing a hank of hair out of his face. “It’s like the trail disappears the moment we try to follow it.”

Unlike his brother, Sasuke could actually make his eyes switch colors. Given that Sasori was older than Itachi, they had no clue as to why Itachi’s eyes would never change. There had been some theories, over the centuries, but they had no clue other than conjecture. “Keep trying,” Sasori rubbed at his temple, setting his own mug down. As the oldest of the Grouping, he was the one who was supposed to keep the others in check. Hidan, Itachi, and Sasuke were all under his authority – if any of them did something that reflected badly upon the Grouping, he would be held accountable. “We need to find whatever is causing all of this.”

“You said something about one of the werewolves you rehabilitated,” Sasuke spoke up again, dragging his knee to his chest. From having been turned, he and his brother were close to four hundred years old, but he had been frozen in place at twenty-one, physically. He still looked like an unsure young man, barely into adulthood. “About them knowing something about all of this. Did you ever find out more?”

“I’ve kept in contact,” Sasori shrugged, shaking his head and closing his eyes. “But he hasn’t been able to remember much more than before. The spellcaster I hired to help him didn’t manage to do much, either. He spent too long shifted.”

“How long?” Itachi spoke this time.

“We don’t know. He last remembered being nineteen, when I asked him,” Sasori glanced towards the window. He’d had Deidara go upstairs and lock himself in a bedroom, had spent an hour before the others arrived making sure the wolf’s scent wasn’t everywhere.

He didn’t know why.

It wasn’t that he thought the other three would attack Deidara if he let them know the werewolf was there. There was no imminent threat, no absolute danger if Deidara was found.

But Sasori hadn’t wanted them to find out.

Perhaps it was something to do with how Deidara only mentioned his history if pushed. The way the werewolf wouldn’t talk about the time before he had been turned. Maybe it was even the way Deidara whined and shrieked in his sleep, wordlessly crying out. Sasori had only had to intervene on a nightmare once, when Deidara had been clawing at his own skin. A being with literal claws could do so much more damage to themselves than a human could, after all, and he had smelled the blood before he had even gotten to the bottom of the stairs.

He couldn’t bring himself to tell his Grouping that he was starting to feel overprotective of a werewolf who could barely even remember his own age.

Deidara had made a few guesses, here and there, but he hadn’t been able to tell Sasori anything concrete. He couldn’t even tell Sasori his last name – had forgotten it in the time he had spent shifted. Werewolves didn’t need their human memories as wolves, after all, and Deidara had spent _some time_ in his wolf form.

 _‘You tend to forget,’_ Sasori heard the words echo in his mind as he had, almost constantly, for two months.

Deidara had been right about that, in some respects. There were some things that could not be forgotten, no matter how hard someone tried. Some injuries and traumas that could not be disposed of, whether he liked it or not.

Sasori frowned at his mug, staring into the depths of it. It was just reheated blood, but he could almost hope that he might divine some answers from the liquid. Something about the attacks on the town was unsettling him, the way they happened in a blitz and then stopped for a few days. The town was under a strict curfew, now, and Sasori and his Grouping were out practically every night to try and put a stop to whatever was happening.

Hidan, with his duties as a Reaper, was being forced to put them aside and work on the problem. Itachi and Sasuke were being forced away from their own projects as well; Itachi was in the middle of spell-mapping out the entire town, marking down for future generations where every curse and protection was. Sasuke had been working on integrating his brother’s project with an online database.

There was other work they should have or could have been doing.

Sasori had been forced to stop rehabilitation.

Before, any werewolf that was in the forest was subject to being sedated and brought to his home in an attempt to understand what they were doing there, to know why. Rehabilitating them had brought down the number of Missing Person reports when one of them inevitably died or got killed by some lucky shot. Some of them were just genuinely in the wrong place at the wrong time, having forgotten how to shift back to human form.

Others of their number were too wild, too feral, to even consider shifting back. Sasori had gotten Hidan to bless his land and make it safe for souls to cross over.

When he had to kill a werewolf, he made sure to give them last rites.

It was the least he could do.

“—sori?”

Sasori blinked a couple of times, shaking his head. “Sorry, what was that?”

“I’m heading out to do a sweep of the forest,” Hidan’s eyebrows rose. “I’ll check in with you in a few hours, don’t turn your phone off.” He stood up, both hands jammed into the pockets on his hips. “Other than that, I’ll see you in about a week.”

“Right,” Sasori nodded, standing up to see him off.

“No,” Itachi called out when he moved to see Hidan to the door. “Sasuke?”

Sasuke stood up instead, seeing the Reaper off. “You have been distracted, lately,” Itachi tilted his head, peering up at him from the corners of his eyes. “Something is off about you. Like your name is being called and you’re turning to see who it is, even when the people you speak to are in the room with you.”

“Something is happening,” Sasori grimaced. “And I don’t—”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Itachi stood up, sliding his arms into his coat. “I just need your assurance that you will come out of this as a whole being.”

“I will,” Sasori nodded.

Itachi inclined his head, saying goodbye with his silence.

In just a few moments, Sasori was alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is anyone paying attention to chapter titles?


	6. Home Is Something Lost

He wanted to go home.

Home was far away and probably lost to him – home was with a cantankerous vampire who acted like the world itself was an inconvenience. Home was with his parents and his old art and his sketchbooks and his cat.

Home was with Sasori.

Deidara looked at the calendar, swallowing his nerves. The anniversary of his attack was coming up, the eighth year of him being ‘dead’ in the eyes of the world. He needed to go home, he wanted to go home.

But he wasn’t sure where or what home was, anymore.

Home was…Uncertain.

Sasori had given him a place to stay, he’d been staying with the vampire for a while – two months, actually. Keeping track of time was a lot easier when he had someone to talk to, occasionally. Even if it was someone like Sasori, who acted like talking to him was something worse than death at times. At least it was someone who could prove that he was awake.

That he was in reality.

Sometimes, however, he could see Sasori smiling faintly at something he said. The vampire was more fond of him than he was letting on, Deidara was sure of it. His entire manor smelled like him and now, after two months, it was a scent Deidara associated with safety and comfort. Part of being a werewolf was being able to smell emotions, in a way, and he could smell happiness. Sasori was, at least partially, glad to no longer be alone.

As he walked down the stairs, Deidara trailed a hand along the wall.

He had gone home, before. Never for long, just long enough to catch the scent of his parents – his pack. Thanks to being unable to shift back, he had been forced to lurk outside, in the edges of the forest. His parents had chosen to live in one of the smaller parts of town, almost separated from the rest, and when he had been a kid, he had played in the woods for hours. His friends had been there with him, sometimes, but he had spent a lot of time entertaining himself.

In his wolf form, Deidara had found one of his old hideouts and listened to his mother and father going about their lives.

The scent of sadness had descended upon the house as the years went by.

He knew, now, that it had been years.

He just didn’t know how many, exactly. That was still something of a mystery, but he felt like he was getting closer to figuring it out.

When he made it down the stairs, Deidara saw Sasori standing in the living room, shuffling books around on the shelf by the fireplace. “I want to visit my house, yeah.” He told the vampire, his hand still on the wall. “I don’t want to go talk to them, I just…I need to go to the house.”

“You want to go to your family’s home,” Sasori raised an eyebrow at him. “Why?”

“Because I just…” Deidara shifted awkwardly, jamming his chin down into his chest. “I can’t remember their scents. I’ll be okay if I do, I just need—”

“We can go.” Sasori met his eyes, his expression unchanged from a second before. Deidara could smell the taut scent of sadness, however. One day, he would have to ask Sasori what had happened to his parents, to his family in general. The vampire acted like he had come from a family like Deidara’s – small, fairly contained to just a handful of people. He wondered if Sasori had given in so quickly because of the situation being familiar.

In the time he had known him, Sasori had never mentioned a family.

Just the members of his Grouping.

Deidara had been shooed upstairs when they came over, Sasori apparently worried about their reactions if they found a werewolf in the house. Given what he knew of relations between their species, Deidara had only been too willing to go. Vampires and werewolves were not known for getting along too well, from what he had seen and heard.

Not that he had much experience, but what little he had made him unwilling to argue with the vampire.

“Get whatever you want to bring with you,” Sasori told him, dragging him out of his thoughts. “If you want to go, we should do it sooner than later.” He glanced one more time at his shelf, then nodded. “We don’t know what schedules we’re working with.”

Deidara gestured down at himself. “I’m ready, yeah.”

With a tilt of his head, Sasori looked him over, then nodded. “If that’s how you want to go,” he motioned for Deidara to follow him. “You know where they live?” he grabbed the keys to the house out of the dish by the door, locking it when they were both outside. “I am not willing to spend several hours trying to find a house by scent alone.”

“I remember,” Deidara stared at the vampire, trying to figure out what was different. Sasori didn’t usually respond to him with resignation and quiet. Ordinarily, Sasori would argue with him about whatever they were talking about, usually giving in after Deidara got loud about it.

Something was different about him, right now, however.

“What’s on your mind, yeah?”

Sasori glanced over at him, keeping pace even as he looked startled. “Why are you assuming something is on my mind?” he asked in turn. His hands were in the pockets of his slacks, his thumbs hooked over the edges of them, and he would have looked completely at ease if it weren’t for the way his jaw was clenched and his shoulders were set.

“I can tell when you’re stressed,” Deidara shrugged, sidestepping a small boulder. His ankle was still giving him trouble, he might have broken it before. He couldn’t remember. It had to have healed badly, even before it had been popped so horribly out of place. “You go quiet and you tense up, like you’re expecting some bad news or something, yeah.” He turned his head to look at Sasori, then used both of his hands to pull the thick braid of his hair over his shoulder. It weighed a lot, like a snake he’d once held at an event his school had hosted. “Did something happen?”

“I just…” Sasori sighed, closed his eyes, then shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about my own family, lately.”

Perking up a little, Deidara nodded. “Yeah?”

“I have some cousins,” he looked away, dropping his gaze to the ground. “I don’t even know if they’re alive and well. I haven’t seen them for quite some time.”

“How long is some time?”

“About two hundred years,” Sasori shook his head again. “I turned the older two because they asked me to. The youngest of the three was a demonic vessel. I haven’t spoken to them or heard from them in two centuries, almost two and a half.”

Deidara let the conversation lapse into silence for a while. The forest around them was fairly quiet, the occasional bird or raccoon moving past them at a running speed. Around them, Deidara could smell the various dens and hiding spots of other animals, a couple of deer about half a mile away. It was only when they were passing by the small stream that ran through the trees that he spoke again. “You should find them,” he muttered. “Enough people have lost their family, recently.”

He had timed it so that by the time he had finished speaking, they had arrived at his old home.

There was an empty space in the driveway and the house was dark. His parents were out for at least a little bit. “I’m going inside,” he spoke the words and watched as Sasori’s expression shifted from almost lost to confused and then on to almost angry.

“Deidara—”

“Nope, too late, yeah!” Deidara hopped up onto the porch, sliding the spare key out from underneath the mat. “You coming in?”

Exasperated, Sasori moved up the stairs and stood next to him. “If only because you getting caught would put something of a damper on the evening,” he semi-scolded. “At least lock the door behind us so you don’t leave obvious tracks – have you come inside before?”

“No,” Deidara tucked the key back into place, then tugged Sasori inside. “Was stuck in my wolf form, yeah. Can’t operate doors like that.” He closed the door, locking it securely. From the outside, it would appear like it had never been opened. “Come on,” he headed for the stairs, towards his old room. “My old room is interesting and if they come home early, we can sneak out the window from there.”

Sasori followed him quietly, unable to hide his quiet laughter from Deidara.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can anyone guess the root of Deidara's problems?


	7. With A Touch Of Regret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter has a description of a pretty gruesome werewolf attack. Deidara hasn't had a great time of things in his life.

Sasori looked around the room, ignoring the scent of humanity that stung at his nostrils.

Not all humans smelled like that, but some did. Grief tainted a scent in a way he never could explain to those without an enhanced sense of smell. Deidara’s childhood bedroom looked just that – a child’s room. A teenager, at best.

He had only gone along with this because he was curious.

The werewolf, behind him, was bouncing gently on the bed, humming quietly as he did.

Looking around for something to stare at, anything, a distraction of whatever kind he could see, Sasori spotted an array of photos on the desk, stepping towards them slowly. There were a couple of shots of art pieces Deidara had to have made, smooth clay sculptures that were, despite Sasori’s opinion of Deidara’s style, impressive and quite beautiful. One of them seemed to be a bird-shaped object that Deidara would probably have been dwarfed by if he’d stood next to it.

Something about that made Sasori smile.

The next photo, however, made his smile drop from his face. If it had been possible, it would have hit the floor and _shattered_.

There was a picture of a young blond boy, his arms looped over and around the shoulders of the two others in the photo with him. Obviously taken at an outing with friends, Sasori noted in the back of his mind, leaning in closer.

Looking closer, he could definitely see where Deidara’s familiar features were.

None of the scarring that he recognized, except for the lines on his palms, and the blond hair he knew so well was much shorter, hanging around his shoulders. The ponytail was a surprising feature of the hairstyle, but it paled in comparison to what else he noticed.

His wrists, clearly seen in the photo, were rounded.

Like a child’s.

Underaged humans had deposits of fat in their wrists, one of the only true, ‘baby fats’ that existed. The softness of their jaws was also a way to determine their age, if one knew what they were looking for.

The Deidara in the photo could not have been more than sixteen years old.

From what the werewolf had said earlier, his bedroom had been set up as a shrine to him, a memorial to his death that had never actually happened. “You were a _child_ ,” Sasori turned to look at Deidara. “When you got turned. You _let_ yourself get _turned_ when you were a _child.”_

Deidara froze in place, bracing his arms on the edges of the bed and pushing himself back upright. His singular eye pinpointed on Sasori and his head tilted to one side. “I did not let myself _turn_ ,” he clenched his jaw, very clearly measuring out his words. “And I was not a kid, yeah.” He stayed where he was, the muscles in his legs twitching as if he wanted to stand up and approach Sasori.

Or he wanted to run.

Given what Sasori knew about werewolves, he suspected it was more the latter.

“No?” Sasori picked up the photo, shoving it almost a little too forcefully at Deidara. “Then what is this? I know how humans’ mourn. The most recent photo of their loved one stays in place, the last good memory stays fresh. You were a _child_ and this is the photo they chose to remember you. Tell me, did you let them bury an empty box?” he took a step forward, watching Deidara twitch. “Did you _watch_ your own funeral?”

“I didn’t choose _anything—”_

“You expect me to _believe you,_ to _pity_ you?” Sasori felt his fangs lengthen, his anger rising up inside of him. “You let your parents believe you were dead, made an entire home _stink_ of grief—”

“I DIDN’T CHOOSE TO DIE!”

Sasori reared back, hissing, then moved to lunge forward. Deidara got there first, jamming his fists into Sasori’s shoulders, pushing him back against the wall. “I was walking home from school,” he snarled the words out, clamping a hand over Sasori’s mouth. “And I was alone for once. My friends had had to go off somewhere else, yeah.” He shook his head, his claws digging into Sasori’s cheek. His chest was heaving and Sasori could feel his heart racing through his hands, could hear his blood pulsing.

“I got nearly run off the road by someone in a big truck,” Deidara spoke over him as Sasori tried to snarl. “Ended up in the woods, yeah.”

Sasori went still as those words hit home.

“Surrounded by a pack of what looked like wolves,” Deidara’s eye was distant, like he was somewhere suddenly so far beyond Sasori’s reach. Just like that, Sasori could feel his mood shifting, his anger draining away to make room for worry and fear. “I was sixteen.”

He snapped back to reality, pulling away from Sasori. “Sorry,” he muttered. He crossed his arms over his chest.

Staying pressed against the wall, Sasori watched him. “What happened to you?”

“I screamed, yeah.” Deidara tilted his head, seeming to be listening for something. “Seemed like it went on for days – I watched them eat my guts. Survived, somehow, don’t exactly get a choice when you’re bitten by that many different werewolves. Guess I just got more infected than ruined, yeah.” He made a noise that might have been laughter in another life. “When I woke up, I was in too much pain to move. That’s what happens when your entire intestinal tract is ripped out of your body and eaten, I guess.

“I spent a couple of months in the woods, awake and starving and in pain.” Deidara shook his head when Sasori opened his mouth. “By the time I’d grown back enough of my internal organs to move, my funeral had happened.”

“And your parents had buried you.” Sasori watched the werewolf, connecting the version he saw before him now with the version he had met first. There was no far removal, no distant memories – the version of Deidara that he had slowly coaxed out was merely a few steps away from being the version he had pulled out of the forest.

Skin and bones and bad memories.

“I couldn’t go back home again,” Deidara looked away, hunching into himself, his shoulders curling inward, framing his face. “By the time I could walk around again, the entire town was talking about my funeral.”

He remembered, now.

The missing posters with an even happier looking Deidara on them, a couple of search parties mentioned here and there, back when the family had still had hope. Deidara, aged sixteen, missing for a week, two weeks, three, four, a month and a half, two months, three…

New posters, each and every time.

Higher reward amounts for finding a pair of panicked parents their only son. Testimonies, tearstained and choked, from his best friends, all about how they should have been with him the day he disappeared.

No full body ever found, but a splatter of blood across the ground that was near where Deidara walked home from school.

That had been around the time the feral werewolves had started showing up.

All of a sudden, Sasori felt _very_ stupid.

“I am an idiot,” he muttered. When Deidara made a confused noise, Sasori shook his head and met his eye. “The town started employing me to relocate werewolves _because_ of you. You had gone missing in what was known to be werewolf territory and humans did what humans have _always_ done. They drove out the local cultures and made room for themselves in the stolen territory. You,” he stepped towards Deidara again, putting a hand on his cheek to nudge his face up just enough to see it from his shorter vantage point. “ _You_ were the reason they started asking me to clear the werewolves out if I could.”

Deidara’s mouth dropped open, his eye wide and startled.

“You said,” Sasori frowned. “Earlier, you said that you didn’t go home again, _couldn’t_ go home again. Why not?” he watched Deidara shake his head. “The blood?”

“Couldn’t. Between the blood and the chunks of flesh and the pieces of internal organs—” Deidara sighed. “They concluded that I had to have died. I read the papers, back when I could still be human shaped without freaking people out. There were police reports that I could hear, from where I was stuck in the woods. I couldn’t move, but I could hear the search and rescue groups.”

“So you have not had your own things since then,” Sasori glanced down at the clothes Deidara wore, still too big for him because Sasori had managed to not have enough time yet to get him better fitting ones.

“I had pants for a while,” Deidara was trembling, his entire body shaking. “The ones I was wearing when I got attacked. Bloodstained, but…”

“Wearable.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Deidara looked like he was going to be sick.

Sasori crossed the room and put an arm around his shoulders, pulling him in close. The werewolf was so warm, the complete opposite of Sasori himself. “I remember your birthday,” he said after a few seconds of silence, pushing down on his urge to remove himself from the physical contact. Deidara operated on it being comforting and he needed it right now. “I saw it on the missing posters. You’re twenty-four.”

Both of his hands on his face, Deidara shuddered, his shoulders hitching up and down.

He was crying.

Sasori winced, dragging the werewolf closer, guiding his head to rest against his neck. In the middle of his old bedroom, surrounded by mementos of a life he had stopped living eight years before, Deidara had never looked as vulnerable as he did right then.

He nearly swore out loud as he realized something.

Deidara had spent much longer shifted than he had realized – if he was right, the werewolf had spent almost six years in his wolf form. Nearly twice as long as the longest he had ever seen someone recover from. Deidara shouldn’t have been able to shift back so easily, much less be walking around in a human form so easily and so soon.

The one werewolf he had known who had been able to shift back after three years had been bound to her bed for six weeks after spending three years shifted. That had been _on top of_ the physical therapy as she relearned how to use her human limbs. Deidara was, inexplicably, walking on his own with barely anything worse than a limp where his ankle had been damaged when Sasori had found him. “You,” he pulled back from Deidara, putting his hands on his cheeks. There were warm tears under his palm and he paused to wipe them off. “Were you a magic user?”

“Yeah,” Deidara nodded, his entire body still shaking. “My mom had me signed up for lessons – that was a surprise for them when we found out. My parents weren’t magic users, not even Adept, yeah.”

“Wait, what?” Sasori frowned. “Magic runs down bloodlines. If you were an Adept, they should have known.”

“Unless I was adopted, yeah,” Deidara sniffled, scrubbing at his face with the back of his hand. He pulled away from Sasori, shuffling through the photo frames on the desk before turning back towards him with one of them in his hands. The image showed a much younger Deidara with a man and a woman. The man had black hair with a smattering of grey and brown eyes that looked kind. The woman had brown hair and hazel eyes, freckles like constellations across her nose. “Adoption agency that linked me up to my parents didn’t even know.”

“I,” Sasori blinked a couple of times. “Something is weird about all of this.”

“Tell me about it,” Deidara shook his head, his braid swishing heavily against his back. Sasori still hadn’t been able to convince him to cut some of the length of it off. The werewolf’s hair had to be at least a quarter of his body weight at this point, Sasori was sure of it. “My birth parents were killed, yeah.”

He straightened up, looking out the window. “We have to go,” he announced suddenly, setting both photographs that had been moved back into place. With a whine, he grabbed Sasori’s wrist and dragged him out of the room and down the stairs. They made it out the back door just as the front door opened and Deidara continued dragging Sasori towards the forest until they could hide behind some of the trees.

From there, Sasori watched as Deidara curled his nails into the bark of a tree, watching his parents moving through the house. “You could go talk to them,” he whispered.

“And say what?” Deidara turned to look at him. “Hi mom and dad, sorry I left you thinking I was dead, it’s just that I should have been and someone tried to murder me. Oh, by the way, the person who did that practically fed me to a pack of werewolves, yeah. If it hadn’t been for the magic we only just knew about, I would have died. I should have died, actually, because my intestines and other internal organs were on the forest floor! My magic saved my ass and kept me alive despite the fact that I might have preferred being dead at that point, yeah.”

With the knowledge of his magic, Sasori could make sense of more of Deidara’s story. “You obviously want to see them again,” he gestured towards the house. “And it’s not like they could say you aren’t who you say you are.”

Deidara shook his head. “No,” he muttered. “Let’s just go, yeah.”

He didn’t give Sasori the chance to say anything else as he turned and began walking towards the Akasuna manor.

Sasori stayed where he was for a few minutes, lurking in the shadows as he watched the two humans in the house settle in for the night. The woman – he hadn’t even gotten their names – went to set her bags down and stopped, both of her hands curling around the edge of the counter. Just barely visible from his vantage point, Sasori could see the current day’s date circled on the calendar. The woman stared at the calendar, then seemed to sigh and set her bags down.

She pulled food out of the bag, setting everything gently down on the counter.

After a few more minutes, the man came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his cheek against hers. He looked so much older than the photo Deidara had shown Sasori, his hair more grey than black.

Feeling like he had been a voyeur of sorts, Sasori turned away from the house and followed Deidara’s path back towards his home. When he caught up to the werewolf, he tucked his hands into his pockets and fell in step with him. They walked in silence for a few minutes before Sasori spoke up. “Today’s the anniversary of the day you were presumed dead, isn’t it? The day they stopped looking.”

Deidara glanced over at him but didn’t say anything, his hands clenched tightly in the fabric of the overlarge shirt he had chosen to wear.

“That’s why you wanted to go see your old house today,” Sasori felt something he couldn’t identify, a clenching in his chest. “You wanted to go home for just a little while, take in their scents. They may be your adopted parents, but they _are_ your family.” He hesitated. “You’ve never had any others that you remember, have you?”

“Let’s just go home, yeah,” Deidara tucked his hands under his arms.

Somehow, it had never occurred to Sasori, before, that Deidara might not have been happy about the situation either. Sasori had been focused on how annoyed he had been, on how frustrating it was to have someone in his space.

He had never thought about how Deidara had felt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is the root of the problem. 
> 
> Sasori is having some troubles, it seems.


	8. Never Fell In Love

He missed his parents.

Going back to the house had both helped and harmed him. On the one hand, their scent had been soothing. His parents were his parents, no matter how old he got, and the scent of home had been comforting.

On the other hand…

Sasori knew, now.

Knew how broken he was, knew the memories that had leaped into clarity first. The first thing he had gotten back from the fog of memories, after shifting back and settling in, had been the day he’d been turned. The definitively worst time of his life and now Sasori was aware of the details of it. Would know how damaged Deidara had been, would know how broken he had felt afterwards.

How destroyed his body had been.

He practically collapsed on his bed in Sasori’s manor, shoving his nose into the pillow. Instead of focusing on the worry he could feel building into a true panic, he thought about the scent of his parents’ house. The faint trace of baking that his father had always done, the smell of his mother’s perfume. The way his room still smelled of clay and paint. Everything had been the same way he remembered it, his clothes in the closet and in the dresser, his broken headphones tossed haphazardly on the bed in frustration.

Deidara had been leaving the house for school in a hurry that morning and had only discovered the issue, one of the sides not working, when he had plugged them into his phone and it hadn’t sounded right.

The room had been a time capsule and Sasori was right.

That was how parents mourned children.

That was not how parents who had moved on from the grief and loss dealt with things. Parents who had moved on tended to have packed things away, tended to have boxed things up and preserved the memories. His room was exactly how he had left it – dry paint on his palette, a lump of clay on his desk. He had seen all of that and had wanted to cry.

Home had never seemed so far away.

A gentle knock on the door told him that Sasori wanted to talk to him. Once they had entered the manor, Deidara had run up the stairs as fast as possible, ignoring everything and anything else. “Yeah,” he called out, still clutching the pillow against his face, burying himself in it.

The door opened slowly and Sasori walked in, holding a mug of something. From where he sat, Deidara could smell the apple cider the vampire had found out he liked. Even before becoming a werewolf, Deidara had never really liked chocolate, had always preferred cider as a kid. Now that Sasori knew that being a kid hadn’t been that far behind him when he was turned, Deidara had to wonder how the vampire was going to react to that.

Sasori sat down on the edge of the bed, holding out the mug silently.

Sitting up, Deidara took it. “Are you going to yell, yeah?”

“Why would I yell?” Sasori frowned. “If you had _chosen_ to be turned at sixteen, I might be yelling right now. You didn’t choose it, though,” he sighed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “You were a teenager and someone attacked you—Deidara, I can put together the details. Whoever attacked you is related to what is happening now. You mentioned recognizing the two werewolves,” Sasori looked at him again. “I just need to know about them. Anything you can remember.”

“Weird eyes,” Deidara traced the tips of his claws along the rim of the mug. “One of them was sort of auburn-colored, yeah. Had these _eyes_ ,” he pulled his hand back, tracing his fingers through the air, now. “Like silver circles.”

“Silver circles?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, his own eye falling half-closed. “The other had bright blue eyes, but the sort of blue you get when it’s dusk. When the sky is filled with dying light and looks ready to burst, just before the pinks and reds and oranges show up.” He met Sasori’s eyes. “It’s fur was dark, with blue bits. Does that help at all?”

Sasori nodded a couple of times. “There are a few missing person files I may need to bring home and have you look at,” he said it slowly, like he was thinking over each word as he said it. “The eye descriptions sound like a couple of people I remember going missing a few years before you did, but I was never able to find them among the werewolves I rehabilitated. After about a year, I was told to stop looking. Their parents had given up on them being found and had moved on.”

“You work on cold cases, yeah.” Deidara grinned at him. “You’re a soft-hearted vampire.”

With narrowed eyes, Sasori glared at him.

“I think it’s great,” Deidara assured him. “It’s nice that you care. That _someone_ cares.” He settled against the headboard, his mug of cider warm against his stomach despite the layer of shirt between it and him. “Were you ever asked to look for me?”

“I was.” There was something tense about his posture, something that Deidara almost wanted to reach out and massage into a softer state. “I had entirely forgotten about it, that was…Nearly a decade ago,” he sighed. “Deidara, you went missing as a sixteen-year-old in the middle of a rash of werewolf attacks. I couldn’t find you,” Sasori reached out and put his hand on Deidara’s shoulder. “I looked for you for almost two years, at the insistence of your parents. They were absolutely certain you were still alive.”

“You talked with them?” Deidara perked up a little.

Sasori cut him off before he could get too excited. “Not personally. The chief of police kept asking me to keep looking because they were asking her. Every time I had to return with the news that you were still missing, I think it must have hurt them a little more.”

“They were right, yeah.” He took a sip of the cider, bringing his knees to his chest. “I was still alive.”

“And you were a magic user.”

“That’s probably why they kept having you look,” Deidara admitted. “I wasn’t registered yet, you need to take a couple of basic classes to do that, but they knew that. My magic showed up strong, yeah. It was something they knew would probably keep me alive, despite whatever might have happened to me.”

For a moment, he thought Sasori hadn’t heard him. The vampire had gotten an odd look on his face, mouthing something as he seemed to think about it. “One second,” he stood up and left the room.

When he came back, he had a phone pressed to the side of his head, a frown pulling his face tight. “This is Sasori,” he answered the person he was calling. “I have to ask something about some old Missing Person reports.” He hummed, nodding, when something else was said. “Yes, I can hold.” He leaned against the desk, his free hand balancing his weight as he tapped the toe of a shoe against the ground. “Yes, hello. I was wondering if you could tell me something about the missing teenagers from the last several years.”

Confused, Deidara just continued to stare at him.

“Yes, well, my question is this – how many of them had been signed up for classes on how to control an unexpected magical inheritance?” Sasori listened for a minute, then nodded again. “Alright. I will be in tomorrow night to come look at the reports again, thank you for your time.”

When he tapped the button to hang up the call, he looked up at Deidara. “The missing teenagers, you included, were all signed up for those classes.”

“Which means?” Deidara barely managed to set his mug down as he sat up, watching Sasori pace around the room.

“It means,” Sasori looked at him with something he recognized as worry flashing through his eyes. “That there is a serial kidnapper operating in town, using werewolf attacks to cover up their crimes. Possibly even a serial killer – and no one has noticed up to this point,” Sasori covered his face with his hands. “Which means that we have no idea how many may have been taken. Or if this is even the first town that has been hit.”

Watching as the vampire panicked, Deidara could only think one thing:

He might have fallen in love, at some point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And onwards we go.


	9. Lines And Leads

It was dusk when he was ready to go.

Deidara was pacing around the living room, wringing his hands together as he seemed to be arguing over something in his head. “You can come with me,” Sasori said again. “It might actually help if you did – you’re one of the people the files refer to. If you came with me, then I could walk in there with proof that at least one of the cold case missing persons is able to be retrieved.”

Shaking his head, his braid flopping heavily across his back, Deidara muttered something. “No,” he negated it again. “I don’t –“ he whined. “Something feels not right, yeah.”

“Are you going to stay here?” Sasori stepped closer to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. The warmth leeching from his skin into Sasori’s palm was about equal to putting his hand on a metal water heater, where hands were never meant to go. “If something does not feel right, then maybe you should be going with me.”

“No,” Deidara said again, firmer this time. “I want to stay here.”

As he spoke, he pointed down towards his feet, perpetually bare. His toes curled against the floor, his other hand clenched into a fist. For a brief moment, Sasori thought about dogs and oncoming storms, the innate animal ability to sense the potential disaster coming towards them. “I will be back in about two hours,” he told him. “If something goes wrong – anything – then the numbers for the phones of the rest of my Grouping are on the side table, next to the house phone.”

It had taken several hours of wrestling with his own mind to decide to put those numbers out for Deidara to be able to find. It meant admitting he had allowed the werewolf into his life.

It meant he had accepted the probability of the two parts of his life meeting.

“Yeah,” Deidara nodded. “Just be safe.”

Nodding, Sasori turned and headed out the door. The police station wasn’t too far away, a brisk walk of about three miles. He made the trip quickly, preoccupied the entire time. Deidara was worrying him. Ever since he had found out about the werewolf having been one of the missing, the night before, the werewolf had been so quiet.

Everything about Deidara being quiet worried him. The werewolf had shown a personality, at times, that had nothing quiet about it.

He was like an explosion contained in a human body, vivid and bright and ready to go off when he got excited. There was just something about him, like bottled sunshine, that drew Sasori in despite his usual habit of being alone. Even when he had gotten together the Grouping, he had still preferred the quiet and solitude of being on his own. Itachi and Sasuke understood that and Hidan had only shrugged and ignored him.

But with Deidara in his home, in his life, Sasori couldn’t honestly say he craved the same loneliness.

The werewolf had come into his life as a half-starved, ragged ball of fur and quickly changed the established order of his household. Before Deidara, there had been a four day maximum on werewolves staying in his home. They were given clothes, some money if they needed it, and a different town to live in.

After Deidara, there hadn’t really been any others.

With the threat on the rise, Sasori had given up rehabilitation for the time being. Everything had become about reducing the possible damage from what was happening around them. His focus had shifted from his usual activities and landed on making sure those he knew would be safe in the current state of existence.

Sasori nearly ran into the door of the police station. In the time he had been thinking, he had apparently been _running_ as fast as he could. The three-mile trip, he found out when he looked at his phone, had only taken about fifteen minutes. With a glance at the clock inside the station, Sasori strode up to the front desk, doing his best to ignore the laughter of one of the two people manning the front desk. With as much dignity as he could muster, he cleared his throat. “I have an appointment to see the police chief,” he told them quietly.

“Yes,” one of them nodded.

He could never quite tell the difference between the two until they actually spoke. No matter how hard he tried, their scents were too similar. Sasori glanced at the one who hadn’t been laughing. His hands were clenched tight around the paper he held. “Sakon?”

Sakon’s twin turned, a frown replacing the laughter of just a few seconds before. “Sakon?”

“Sorry,” Sakon shook his head. “You’re here about the missing persons' reports, right.” He nodded, picking up the phone and paging the police chief. He spoke quietly into the phone, finishing the call quickly and hanging up before he stood and left the desk. “I’m taking my break,” he told his brother. Ukon stared after him, then glanced at Sasori.

As was much more common than it used to be, Sasori felt like an idiot.

Sakon had been the boyfriend of one of the missing. A teenager by the name of Kimimaro, if he remembered correctly, one of the first to disappear as far as they knew. Ukon sat back down, his hands clenched into fists. The humor from earlier had disappeared, his eyes practically steel as he turned his gaze on Sasori. “What are you doing with the files?” he asked, managing to keep his tone even.

“Looking into them again,” Sasori nodded when Ukon’s jaw dropped. “Something new came up.”

“Something new as in new evidence?”

“Something new as in a new possible clue.” Sasori corrected. Before he had the chance to say anything else, the chief of police stepped out of her office, her hair pulled back into a rough ponytail. She waved him in, closing the door behind him.

Tsunade sat down at her desk, dropping heavily into her chair and rubbing her hands down her face. “With the new clue you found,” she said each word like it pained her. “We found several new files to add to the pile. We looked into the lessons that each teenager had been signed up for and we found that they were all through the same studio. None of them actually made it to the lessons and all of them disappeared.” She peered at him from between her fingers, her eyes alone telling him how exhausted she had gotten since he had called her.

“How many is several?” Sasori glanced down at the stacks of papers on her desk, trying to discern which stack was what.

“Twelve,” Tsunade leaned back in her chair. “On top of the nine from this town, there have been twelve more added. And that,” she slapped a hand down on top of one of the stacks, pushing it towards him. “Has only been from the two immediate neighbors. We haven’t had time to call the other districts since you handed us this information.”

“Twenty-one in total,” Sasori muttered, counting them off automatically in his head. He shuffled through the files until he found Deidara’s, staring at the photo his parents had used to try to find him. In it, his hair was up in that same half-ponytail, bulky headphones down around his neck and a pair of ratty jeans with holes in the knees tying his outfit together. The shirt he wore was a teal color with what looked like paint splatters across it, the whole thing practically screaming out about the artistic tendencies the wearer had.

“How, _exactly_ , did you come across this link?” Tsunade caught his attention again. “We’ve been looking into these cases for over a decade, Sasori. Because of the way they all disappeared, we never bothered looking into the lessons they had been signed up for and never attended.”

“I have a source of information,” Sasori pulled the photo of Deidara out of the file and handed it to her. “I found one of them.”

Tsunade took the photo, her jaw dropping as she saw which one it was. “The Iwakawa kid?” she stuttered a couple of times, then managed to find her footing and continued. “His parents were so persistent, they were _convinced_ he wasn’t dead.” She continued to stare at the photo. “They were right?”

“He’s one of the werewolves I was rehabilitating,” Sasori nodded. “I’ll have to convince him to come in, some time, but he’s safe where he is, for now. I’m not kicking him out.”

I don’t want to, he thought.

He kept it to himself.

Pulling out his phone, he took quick photos of each photo in the files. Tsunade hid her face in her hands. “I’ve been looking for these kids for a decade,” she whispered. “And I _failed_ at it because there was seemingly no common denominator.” She looked up at him. “Please,”

“I’ll help bring them home,” Sasori stood, tucking his phone away. “If I can, they will be home within a couple of weeks.”

He walked out of her office, sighing as the door shut behind him.

The image on his phone of the girl and boy who had disappeared at the same time was the main reason he had asked to see the files again. Pein and Konan, as they were named in their files, had disappeared a few years before Deidara. From the photo he had taken, he could see the silver lines in Pein’s eyes, the too-blue eyes of Konan.

When he made it home, he settled back in, hearing no noise from Deidara. When he checked on him, the werewolf had fallen asleep already.

The hours of the night passed quickly as Sasori kept himself busy. Between sketching the likenesses of the missing teenagers and making sure the refrigerator was stocked with food for Deidara to pull out and reheat, there was almost not enough time. By the time he had finished, it was heading towards dawn.

Sasori dropped into bed, exhausted but feeling hopeful for the first time in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this story interesting to anyone? I've got it finished + a couple of others one-shots in the same series and a planned multi-chapter of what happens next. This is just the beginning of this series. 
> 
> Would that interest anyone?


	10. Things Out Of Hand

By the time he realized there was an intruder, it was almost too late.

Deidara moved without thinking about it, throwing himself at the man standing next to Sasori’s bed. The vampire was passed out, heavily asleep in the way he was meant to be during the day. He had been on his way to the kitchen, having woken up and wanted a glass of water. His schedule had shifted to somewhat match Sasori's and now he was grateful for it - if he had been out of the house, Sasori would have been in danger without him knowing. The man had been reaching out with a knife and Deidara had just _moved._

There hadn’t been much thought to it.

The only thing he could really think, now that he was stuck in the moment, was circling through his mind again and again.

Movies got it all wrong.

Deidara took a deep breath – or rather, he tried to. Movies had gotten so many things wrong. A knife to the stomach didn’t feel like burning, painful but something he couldn’t move through. It felt like ice in his gut, a thin lance of cold driving towards the center of him. The hunter, his murderer, whoever the fuck it was, stared back at him with narrowed eyes.

“Well,” the man said. “This is interesting.”

He twisted the knife, yanking it out of Deidara’s stomach with a cackle, pushing him away and letting him drop to the floor. For a second, Deidara tried to grab at him, tried to scrabble his claws against skin, but it was a useless effort and he just ended up curled in a loose ball on the carpet. A few seconds passed like an eternity for Deidara as he tried to drag himself towards Sasori’s bed.

“I come to kill a vampire,” the intruder continued. “And I find a little werewolf who so resembles the little _brat_ I tried to kill off almost nine years ago.” He put a foot on Deidara’s shoulder, forcing him down to the ground. “And not only is he not _dead_ ,” he grunted, pressing down even harder. A few of Deidara’s ribs snapped under the pressure. “But he’s living with the vampire I’ve come to _kill._ Looks like you were trying to warn him, too.” His foot suddenly moved, coming down with a vicious pressure on his spine.

He crouched down and, just for a moment, Deidara remembered him doing the same once before.

The man had been standing at the edge of the mass of fur, in the middle of the attack, watching with a sadistic grin on his face. He had kneeled down to meet Deidara’s eyes, just before one of them had been chewed out of the socket.

He’d seen the man around town before, he thought as his body tensed up and blood dribbled past his lips.

“Were you protecting him?” the man sneered. “Did you think you could keep him alive?”

Deidara glanced towards the bed and thought of Sasori. The way the vampire had brought him in from the cold woods, helped him get better. The odd little ways that Sasori had fussed over him, from buying him an entire wardrobe of clothing he liked to making sure Deidara ate three times a day, even if Sasori was passed out to hide from the sunlight. Somewhere along the line, he’d become fond of Sasori, willing to go through a knife to the gut to keep him safe. Somewhere along the line, he had actually fallen in love with him.

“Yeah,” Deidara coughed the word out, biting off the end of it.

Sasori had explained, once, a couple of weeks ago, about how he was different from the other vampires he knew. Most vampires had a mandatory sleep time, with the sun out and the daytime stretching out in front of them. They would be unconscious until sundown, unaware of the world passing them by. It was part of how they could sleep through decades, through the centuries.

A way to keep from being lonely until they found more like them. Vampires were always stronger in groups, strength gained from each other. They were called Groupings and they were important.

But Sasori…

Sasori could wake up if he were to be given enough time. He didn’t like it, hated waking up before the sun went down, but he could wake up.

He could save himself if Deidara just _stalled._

“You tried to kill me,” he hacked the words out, blood dripping down his chin as he spoke. The broken ribs must have punctured something, but he couldn’t tell. Everything hurt too much to know which pain was which. “ _Why?_ ”

“Why?” the man laughed, reaching down and patting gently at the top of Deidara’s head. It was a patronizing gesture, the sort of thing an adult would do to a child while talking down to them. “You were set to inherit something,” his smile was knife-thin, a blade of perfectly white teeth and manic eyes on top. “I did not _want_ you to inherit it.”

“Got to give me more than that,” Deidara reached up and clawed blindly at his ankle.

He was rewarded a second later when the man lashed out and kicked him, sending him rolling over a couple of times. His ribs hurt, his stomach hurt, he left a trail of blood on the ground, and—

Sasori shifted in his sleep.

Deidara almost wanted to cheer, but he coughed up blood instead. “I mean,” he wheezed his laughter, grinning up at the man. “If I’m supposed to die, I want to know the reason, yeah.”

The man moved closer and dropped down to sit on his chest, pinning his shoulders under his knees. He put his hand on Deidara’s sternum, pressing hard enough to put more pressure on the broken ribs. “You were going to be _powerful,”_ he clarified. “The son of two different types of magic users—you would have been immeasurably powerful. Your father used to spin things out of matter, could create anything he wished out of nothing— your mother used to know what would happen before it did, could predict timelines and know every branching possibility. I have chased your bloodline like a dog on a scent trail, I have found every single member of your bloodline,” he leaned his head down, his mouth next to Deidara’s ear.

“ _I killed all of them._ ”

If he managed to survive, Deidara thought he would never forget what happened next.

In an instant, it was like a wrecking ball had flown into the man, tossing him across the room hard enough to get a cracking noise out of his head hitting the wall. His hands twisted into claws, his eyes so red that they looked like blood, wide open and insane, Sasori stood over Deidara.

He hissed and Deidara nodded.

Sasori was awake, he would be okay now.

With that thought, Deidara let his eye slip shut, his entire body going loose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shortest chapter so far -- but one of my favorites.


	11. Worst Fears

The scent of blood was what woke him.

The talking had not even registered when he threw himself out of bed and tossed the man sitting on a bloodied Deidara across the room. He heard the man’s head hit the wall and he ignored the damage that must have followed. Deidara was bleeding and seemingly unconscious.

Sasori crouched down, feeling for a pulse with trembling hands.

For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, he was afraid for someone’s life. Not since his parents had –

Not since then had he felt this fear. Deidara’s heart was slowing down, having trouble working with a limited quantity of blood. The scent of him was all over the room, concentrated in puddles and smears. His hands were loosely cupped over the wound in his stomach and Sasori forced himself to stand and _run_.

The medical supplies he’d stored to help the ones he needed to help.

They were in the bathroom, under the sink.

He could still think logically, sort of, and he was thankful for it. If he hadn’t been able, Deidara would end up dead. He couldn’t let that happen – the werewolf had become something of a bright spot in his life. Deidara had managed to push his way in and settle in Sasori’s heart, gripping tight with everything in him. He’d been through too much, been too hurt for his life to end _here_ , because of some hunter-type of person with a psychotic smile.

The man had been _smiling_ while sitting on top of Deidara, who was still _bleeding out_.

Sasori had been unsure of what was happening when he’d thrown the man, but he knew that the man had not belonged in his home, attacking his werewolf.

He did not give himself time to think about that sentence echoing in his head as he grabbed the bandages and the healing salves and turned on his heel, nearly faceplanting as he rushed back to Deidara. The werewolf, his werewolf, was still exactly where he had been left: bleeding and fading into unconsciousness on the floor of Sasori’s bedroom.

The attacker had made it _that far_ and Deidara had, it seemed, _gotten in between them._

Sasori had been unconscious, been unprepared, been vulnerable, and Deidara had made sure that he would be safe. Had, it seemed, stalled for enough time for Sasori to wake up. Sasori dropped down to his knees, putting a hand on Deidara’s hip, thankful for the first time for the werewolf’s habit of not wearing a shirt to sleep in. The way he stayed in his sleep clothes unless he needed to change out of them. The pajama pants he wore were soft blue and red flannel and they were slung low enough across his hips to keep any fibers from getting into the injury.

Into the hole in his gut.

The hole he had gotten while, apparently, defending Sasori.

With quick movements to keep his hands from trembling, Sasori opened the jar of healing salve. Itachi had come up with it, with Sasuke’s help, after Sasori had asked them to try to find something he could use to patch up werewolves. Their healing often went too fast to do anything useful, which often meant that bullets and broken pieces of things would end up staying inside their bodies.

The salve was meant to keep infection at bay, accounting for their healing speed.

It would also, if applied quickly enough, keep blood loss from being deadly. Sasori just had to hope that the knife that had been _shoved into Deidara_ was not poisoned. For a moment, while he was applying the salve, he saw Deidara’s eye open.

With his waist length hair spread across the floor and his quickly paling complexion, Deidara looked almost like a divine spirit. They usually haunted churches or other places of worship. Consecrated grounds, no matter what denomination.

Hysterically, Sasori could only think, ‘ _I would never be able to see him again if that happened.’_

From downstairs, he could hear his front door slamming open, allowing pounding footsteps to come running up the stairs towards him. Night had fallen while he had dealt with the intruder, pouring his energy into healing Deidara.

“Sasori?”

Itachi’s voice. Sasuke’s scent followed his brother into the room, the younger Uchiha stopping dead in his tracks once he saw the werewolf and the blood on the floor.

Without any hesitation, Itachi rushed forward, putting his hands on Sasori’s shoulders. Offering his strength, letting it flow along the Grouping bond. Contrary to popular belief, vampires could actually perform magic. It was difficult, certainly, but they could.

Itachi’s strength flowed into him and his hands _sparked_.

Deidara jolted, his entire body going tense as he flailed, a noise like a shriek getting caught behind his teeth.

Another pair of hands landed on Sasori’s shoulders, right next to Itachi’s. Sasuke and he had never really gotten along all that well but it did not seem to matter in that moment. The younger vampire was lending his strength, pushing it along the faint bond of their shared Grouping. Sasori pressed his hands against Deidara’s stomach a little more firmly, willing his magic to wake and flow into the werewolf, keep him alive, keep him safe.

The scars that dragged down Deidara’s hips framed his hands, rough skin beneath his fingers as he closed his eyes, concentrating on nothing more than the situation literally at hand.

For all the effort he was forcing into it, nothing seemed to be happening.

Deidara was not waking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Going to update TWICE right now because this chapter is _short._


	12. Things I'll Tell You

“Hello?”

Deidara looked around, trying to figure out where he was. His voice echoed down a long corridor, bouncing back to him eventually. When he looked down, his feet were bare and he could feel a chill coming up from the floor. His steps didn’t make much noise and he frowned as he started walking down the hall.

“Is anyone here?”

Further down, he could hear people talking, even though he couldn’t see anyone. A door on one side of the hall practically blew open, allowing a man with bright red hair to come tumbling out, almost losing his footing.

He caught himself, brushing off his outfit and standing up straight. His eyes were purple, which wasn’t the weirdest thing about him.

That was reserved for the fact that he looked like Sasori.

“Uh,” Deidara took a step back, looking around. “Hey, yeah.” He raised a hand, unsure of what else to do. “Where am I?”

“Oh,” the man smiled and moved closer, offering Deidara a short bow. “My name is Satoshi,” he studied Deidara for a minute, clasping his hands together in front of himself. The clothing he wore was traditional Japanese, something Deidara couldn’t remember what it was called right then. He wouldn’t have looked out of place at a costume party for rich people, or a museum showing off what fashion had once looked like.

“Satoshi.” Deidara hunched down, trying his best not to show exactly how confused he was.

Satoshi nodded. “And you are Deidara. You have kept my son company for some time now, kept him in line. His temper gets the best of him at the worst times.” He turned his head to watch a woman with Sasori’s eyes step out of the room he had come from. “Atsuko?”

She smiled at them both, the same smile that Deidara occasionally saw on Sasori’s face when the vampire thought he wasn’t looking.

“For all that my husband is forgetting his manners,” she started off, chuckling when Satoshi’s cheeks flushed. “We do indeed have much to thank you for.” She put her hand on Deidara’s shoulder. “Our son cannot join us in the realm of the dead, cannot join us in wandering the halls that have housed the spirits of our family for millennia.”

“…He’s a _vampire_ ,” Deidara blinked a couple of times, his jaw dropping as he realized. “Unless and until he dies, he’s not going to come here, yeah.”

“Yes,” Atsuko reached up and clasped her hands to his cheeks. “And I dearly wish that you do not come here too early either. You have reached a crossroads, moon child. You can, if you wish, but,” she shook her head, her long brown hair falling over her shoulders. “I do believe you would be happier staying in the realm of the living.”

“Yeah,” Deidara looked at the both of them. “How do I get back?”

Satoshi’s mouth twitched as he moved forward again, putting his hands on Deidara’s shoulders and _pushing_ as hard as he could.

Deidara barely had time to yelp before—

 

He sat up, snarled at the pain in his stomach, then flopped back down on his side.

With his vision blacking out every few seconds, Deidara was honestly surprised he managed to stay awake the entire time it happened. It felt very much someone had run him through the heavy wash cycle, then wrung him out.

When he managed to sit up completely, bracing his weight on his right arm, putting as little pressure on his left side as possible, Deidara leaned back against the wall. He recognized the room he was in – Sasori had a small medical bay sort of situation in his house, to keep the people he wanted healthy and well alive. He had just never needed it before. When movement caught his attention, he stopped breathing for a second as he spotted a black-haired man with red eyes standing in the doorway.

“So our patient is awake, then.” The man spoke with almost no emotion in his voice, leaving Deidara to have to guess what he was thinking.

“Fuck you,” Deidara hissed out.

One of his eyebrows rose, followed by the other. After a few seconds, Deidara noticed the sharpness to his scent, something he could barely smell over the scent of his own blood. The man was a vampire.

Sasori had mentioned others in his life, had mentioned that they hadn’t known Deidara was living with him.

Tensing up, Deidara clamped his mouth shut and watched the strange vampire walk across the room. By the time he reached the table, another vampire had entered the room, coming in only to lean his back against a wall with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked younger than the first, related but definitely younger. His eyes were also bright red, just like the first vampire’s. That was something Deidara hadn’t noticed until he had gotten close.

“How are you feeling?” the first to enter the room asked him, intently looking at his face before looking down towards his stomach. “You were close to dying.”

“I—” Deidara opened his mouth to agree with something, to say _something_ that slipped away the moment he tried to put it into words. “Hurts, yeah.” He settled on, almost growling out loud in irritation at his speech habit showing up right then. “Got stabbed.”

“Four of your ribs were shattered,” the second vampire to enter the room finally spoke up. “We thought Sasori was going to tear the building down with his bare hands. It seemed like it.”

“Who are you two?”

The first looked at the second, who smirked. “I am Itachi,” he introduced himself. “The one looking entirely too pleased with himself for something is my little brother, Sasuke.”

“Do you _have_ to mention I’m your younger brother?”

“Absolutely,” Itachi turned back to Deidara. “The person who attacked you, the one who stabbed you and was intending on both your death and Sasori’s, is a man named Obito. He is one of our cousins. His temper and behavior did not used to be this way and I am sorry for his behavior nearly killing you.”

“He,” Deidara sat up a little more, wincing before leaning back against the wall. “He mentioned something about my family.” He thought back through the hazy memories, his entire face pinching in a frown. “He said that he killed my entire bloodline, yeah. That I was supposed to be powerful or something. It didn’t make much sense, but maybe I heard him wrong. I mean,” he gestured down at his stomach. “I was bleeding a lot and in pain. Things were going wrong really quickly.”

Itachi frowned, his placid face finally showing some emotion. “What is your last name?”

“Iwakawa,” Deidara shrugged his shoulder. “Or, it used to be. Kind of lost the right to it when I was assumed dead and buried.”

“How the hell does that _happen—”_

“Sasuke,” Itachi turned on his little brother again, narrowing his eyes. “I am…I apologize, but did you just say Iwakawa?” he looked at Deidara. “As in the teenage boy who disappeared and the only thing left behind were bits and pieces of flesh and blood on the ground?”

“Yeah,” Deidara nodded, taking a deep breath in through his nose. “Do you mind if I lay back down?” he cupped his hand over the still-healing wound under the bandages on his stomach. As soon as he put any effort into thinking about his body, about them, he realized they were there. “This hurts a lot.” He watched as Itachi nodded, then carefully maneuvered himself back on his uninjured side, wincing when he pressed his back into the bed too hard. There was probably bruising on his back, he thought. Shattered ribs, plus he remembered the man stepping on his spine.

Another thought occurred to him, his mind already going hazy with exhaustion. “Where’s Sasori, yeah?”

“He’s asleep in his room again,” Sasuke spoke up once more. “We’ve got Hidan watching over him, making sure nothing else happens. He’s going to want to talk to you when he wakes up.”

“Okay…” Deidara felt his eyelids growing heavy, drooping as his body forced him into sleep.

 

The next time he woke up, someone was holding his hand.

Sasori’s scent was easy enough to identify, the sharp flash of desert winds and wood shavings from his latest puppet. When he managed to open his eye, Deidara saw the mop of bright red hair the denoted his vampire.

He paused at that phrasing, even in his own head, then accepted it and moved on.

His vampire.

Sounded about right.

“You’re awake,” Sasori’s voice was a wreck, like he had spent several hours shouting. His hands were trembling, wrapped around Deidara’s. “I thought you had—I thought you _died_ , Deidara!” his eyes flashed, the deep brown that verged into red turning entirely red for a moment. “Do you know what it would have done to me if you had? I didn’t even know you were that important to me until this happened.” He stopped talking for a minute, bringing their entwined hands up to his mouth. “Do you know what it would have done to me if you hadn’t woken up?”

Deidara couldn’t help it, he had to. The giggle that pulled out of him made his chest and stomach ache, but it was worth it.

“I was going to walk into the daylight, Deidara,” Sasori leaned his head down, his forehead on the edge of the bed. “If you hadn’t woken back up, I was going to march myself out into the sunlight and let myself turn to nothing more than ash.”

“You’re an idiot, yeah,” Deidara reached out with his other hand. “Why do you think I protected you?”

Sasori froze, his head popping back up so he could stare at Deidara. “ _What?_ ”

“You’re an idiot,” Deidara said again, laughing once more. “I protected you because I wanted to. I…You kept me sane,” he shook his head. “And we’re doing this all out of order, yeah. Near-death experience is supposed to be at the same time as the confession.” He reached up after a couple of seconds of struggle, curling his free hand in the vampire’s hair.  “Of course, I should have expected as much from my idiot vampire, yeah.”

“Your—”

“Yeah,” Deidara nodded. “Mine.”

Sasori blinked a couple of times, looked like he was going to say something, then closed his mouth with a clack of his teeth and nodded. “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “I—alright.”

“Come here?” Deidara scooted over on the bed, making just enough room for the vampire to slide in next to him. “I don’t think you’ll let me out of bed for a while, yeah. Which means, of course, that I’m going to have you join me here instead of suffering alone.” He watched as Sasori seemed to be processing what he’d just said.

“You have the oddest way of deciding things,” Sasori shook his head, sounding exasperated even as he climbed in next to Deidara. “The Uchiha siblings are never going to let me live this down,” he groused. “Nor is Hidan.”

“As long as they don’t attack you, yeah.” Deidara glanced pointedly down at his stomach. “I don’t think I could stand up to the test of being stabbed again. Give me a few days and we’ll see.” He squeaked in surprise when Sasori latched on to him, arms holding him tightly. “Danna?”

“We are not going to be ‘giving it a few days’ until you are stabbed again,” Sasori growled the words out. “If I have my way, it will be a long several decades at a minimum. Deidara, you almost _died._ I have not felt that sort of fear since…” he shifted awkwardly. “It has been _centuries_ , you absolutely insane furball.” He clamped an arm over Deidara’s waist. “Don’t—” he shuddered, burying his face in Deidara’s hair. “Don’t _leave_. You can’t leave,” he shivered and scooted as close to Deidara as possible. “You can’t die like that.”

“I won’t,” Deidara turned his head, nudging his nose against the top of Sasori’s head. “I do have to go visit my parents.”

“What are your parents’ names?” Sasori peered up at him, only his eyes visible.

 “Mira and Toshi Iwakawa.” Deidara leaned his head back, wincing at the trembling pain coursing through his body. “I’m tired now, yeah. I’ll wake up, I swear.” His eye closed. “You’re still going to be here when I wake up, yeah?”

“Yes,” Sasori relaxed as well.

Silence passed between them for a while before Sasori went tense. “Wait, did you just call me Danna?”

Deidara cackled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sort of a slow-burn and this is just the beginning of the series.
> 
> There are so many things to cover after this.
> 
> Also: Hello Sasori's parents. You guys should keep an eye on them.


	13. Taking Care

Among a list of possible things it could mean, Danna also meant ‘husband’.

Sasori watched as Deidara slept, the werewolf’s hair haphazardly curled into a loose tail and pulled off to the side. The thought of what Deidara had called him turned over and over in his mind, distracting him entirely. Deidara had a way of causing chaos and making him look at the world differently. He had worried Sasori a lot and then he had gone and turned the entire world on its head.

Again.

That seemed to be his main mode of operation.

He could sense Itachi before the other vampire even made it to the door, his steps soft as he leaned against the frame. “Is he alright?” he crossed his arms over his chest, bright red eyes narrowed in an expression that somehow managed to be both placid and concerned. “I know he was close to dying for a time – Excuse me, dead for a time.” He glanced over Sasori to Deidara. “From the damage to his body, the poison on that blade, he should still be dead.”

“That’s the second time,” Sasori sat up carefully, settling Deidara’s head in his lap. He brushed a hand through his hair, feeling the warmth that radiated from the wolf. His hair had to weigh at least thirty pounds, how could he stand to have what amounted to a full blanket attached to his head?

“The second time?”

Sasori looked up at him, his hands going still. “When Deidara was turned,” he hesitated, then sighed. “When he was sixteen, he was forcibly turned into a werewolf. The attack consisted of him being literally ripped apart.” He traced a finger over Deidara’s cheek. “In his words, his internal organs were scattered across the forest floor. I have no idea exactly how awful it must have been for him, how painful it would have been. I do know that, based on his scars alone,” he gestured at Deidara’s stomach. “He should have died.”

Itachi moved closer, stopping a few feet away as their Grouping bond flared up. Sasori winced at the overprotectiveness coming from him smacked against their bond. “Don’t worry,” Itachi raised his hands in a surrendering gesture. “I will not touch him.”

Sasori hadn’t even realized he had bared his fangs, his entire body tensing up. “I—”

“I think, given the circumstances, it is understandable,” Itachi met his eyes. “He was attacked and nearly killed. Was killed. His heart stopped for a time, his body went too still to be a living being. You will have to ask him about what occurred while he was dead, but I suspect that the two of you have much to speak about.” He watched Deidara for a moment, then nodded. “Speak to him about it, Sasori.”

“I’m going to,” he nodded as well. Deidara had managed to survive things he should never have been able to.

There was something about him, about his bloodline.

There was something about _him._

Deidara had come into his life as a bundle of bones and fur, too thin and almost feral. In the time he had been living with Sasori, he had been near-wild. His hair was tangled and long, reaching towards his hips, wafting the summer-warm scent of him into the air wherever he went. He was a werewolf, they were associated with the moon –

So why did he smell of summer and earth?

“There’s something strange about him,” Sasori didn’t even bother to look up at Itachi. “Something about him is…Unusual.”

“We will find it out,” Itachi assured him. “I believe the answer may lie in his blood-relations. Obito said something about having slaughtered them all, I think we may need to know _why._ ” He looked up as someone approached. From the way he wasn’t relaxing immediately, it wasn’t his brother. The two of them had an odd bond – despite Sasuke having avoided Itachi for a few decades, convinced that he had been the one to kill their family and turn him, they were as close as brothers could be. They trusted each other to have their backs, made certain that the other one was alright.

When Sasuke ran off to try to burn off his anger or his fear, Itachi was the one who managed to find him after giving him some time to pull himself together.

The one time Sasori could remember Itachi running off on his own, Sasuke had been the one to find him.

The time they had both run off had been difficult for the entire Grouping. It had been Sasori and Hidan left behind, trying to find the other two. That situation had been resolved, eventually, with Itachi coming back and being too exhausted to go and find his little brother.

When the door opened, Sasori raised an eyebrow.

Hidan had come in, leaving his scythe at the door, propped carefully against the frame. “You,” he pointed at Sasori. “You _motherfucker,_ ” he continued, shaking his head. “When in the fuck were you going to tell us you’d kept one of the werewolves?”

“I wasn’t,” Sasori felt his nose wrinkle, his fangs still out as Hidan moved to where Itachi was and then stopped. “I didn’t think it was any of your business.” He petted at Deidara’s hair, then turned back to the other two. “And I didn’t _keep him._ He’s not a _pet._ ” Sasori narrowed his eyes at Hidan, silently daring him to say something else. He was going to defend Deidara’s position in his life –

He had grown attached to the werewolf.

 _His_ werewolf.

Deidara had called him his idiot vampire, after all. He belonged with Deidara and Deidara belonged with him. They were a matched set and he would fight tooth and nail to keep him.

Hidan just laughed. “Fucking—” he shook his head. “I was wondering if something like this was going on.” He gestured at Deidara. “I thought you might find one to keep around, eventually. You like pretending you’re okay with being alone, but you’re not.” He snorted, waving away Sasori’s attempted protests. “No, you’re really not. I know you like to think you are, but you need company just as much as the rest of us,” he jerked a thumb towards Itachi. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be in the Grouping. You’d have stayed solitary instead of gathering up the vampires you found and joining us together.”

Sasori relaxed minutely.

That was true enough.

He had been wandering through his old hometown in Japan when he had found the Uchiha brothers, one after the other. Hidan had been found when the three of them had wandered through the settlement his family had lived in. Sasori had been left with enough money and training to gain a high-class place in the world, thanks to his parents.

He had been the only one of the four to not be starving and near-insanity when he’d found another.

Hidan had only just managed to free himself from the basement he had been trapped in. Thankfully, it had been dark out when he escaped. His grief had been palpable when he found the corpses of his family.

Some sort of plague, Sasori had assumed. Many of them had died in their beds.

It had been something that had put him ill-at-ease for some time – the youngest to die had been seven years old, according to Hidan. Their bodies had been about two weeks old at the point Hidan managed to get out. Vampires couldn’t be plague victims, even if they drank the blood of one. Sasori and Itachi had spent several days coaxing a sane person out of the mess that had been Hidan at the time.

He had only wanted a support system in place for those who could not find another Grouping.

“I’m actually fucking happy for you,” Hidan took another step closer, his hands tucked into his back pockets. “Like…Really fucking happy. You don’t look like you’re wanting to go off somewhere and walk into the sunlight.”

“Did I ever?”

“Yeah,” Hidan met his eyes and held his gaze. “You did.”

Sasori could concede to that point. Before Deidara had shown up in his life, Sasori had been so tired of everything. He had been stuck in a routine, despite the occasional unpredictability of rehoming werewolves from the woods next to the town. Now, with Deidara’s head in his lap and his Grouping mostly in the room, he realized how much more energy he had.

He had grown stagnant, before.

Exhausted.

Hidan was right – he had been ready to die. There had been nothing to look forward to and he had been staring down an eternity alone.

Perhaps it was a little unhealthy, but Deidara had given him something to look forward to.

He—

Oh.

Sasori, for the first time he had been aware of in decades, actually smiled. Well, that was alright, then. He had fallen in love with the absolutely insane werewolf who had turned his entire life upside-down. “I guess I am happy, now,” he muttered.

Hidan just laughed again.

“I am going to go make sure Obito does not attack Sasuke,” Itachi announced. “The spells keeping him contained seem to be holding, but it would not do to have him escape.” He fluttered his fingers in a leave-taking wave, his other hand tucked into a pocket. “Take care of each other,” he called back to Sasori.

Somehow, Sasori knew he didn’t mean him and Hidan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're coming up on the end of this part of the story and I am excited about what is next.


	14. Everything Where You Left It

His hair really was too long.

Shaking his head, he curled the length of it around his arm, having to wrap it several times to wind it all up. It went down to his waist and it weighed a nearly literal _ton_. With a glance over to the scissors he had on the bed beside him, Deidara let his hair unravel from around his arm, reaching for the hair ties he’d piled close by. It took several of them to section off his hair correctly, but he managed to put it into a handful of tails thin enough to cut.

By the time he was done, each cutoff was about two feet long, leaving him with hair that fell just below his shoulders.

He spent a few minutes trimming the ends and making it look perfectly even, then stared at himself in the mirror. Deidara grinned at his reflection, then turned towards the pile of clothes on the bed. The jeans were dark, almost black, and skinny-legged. He followed that with a plaid shirt in a thick fabric on top of a t-shirt Sasori had rolled his eyes at, the word ‘Boom’ written across the chest in red lettering with a graphic of an explosion behind it.

The shoes and socks were the most difficult part.

After having spent so long shifted, bare feet had become the usual option he chose. Shoes and socks hadn’t even been a part of his life for several years.

They weighed more than he remembered.

Deidara shook his foot, frowning at it, then looked in the mirror. The person he saw in the reflection was something like who he remembered. “There you are, yeah,” he told himself. “Wondered where you went.” He hesitated, then grabbed another hair tie, pulling half of his hair up into a ponytail. When he let his hands drop back to his sides, they clenched into fists.

He remembered being the person he saw in the mirror. It had been a long time, almost nine years, but he remembered.

Taking a deep breath, Deidara nodded and grabbed the messenger bag off the floor next to the bed, filled with a couple of sketchbooks and art supplies as well as a couple of snacks and a water bottle. Sasori had wanted to come with him, had wanted to make sure he would be alright, but Deidara had wanted to go alone.

He didn’t know how well his parents would react to seeing him again.

Passing by Sasori’s room, Deidara traced a hand over the door. It had been several weeks since the attack that had nearly ended with Deidara dead and the vampire had since upped the number of protection spells on the manor. The spell on his door would tell him that Deidara had stopped by for a second, had basically left a note for him on his way out of the house.

He continued walking.

The forest path still somewhat panicked him, the memory of being hunted a couple of different times making him nervous as he went through. Deidara ignored his nerves, however, and kept walking. It was the fastest and easiest path to take.

Eventually, he made it to the house he had grown up in.

Both cars were in the garage and he took a deep breath as he stared at them for a minute. He could still walk away, if he wanted to. The threat had passed, he could go home without the guy who had attacked him finding his parents and hurting them, too. His nails grew a little sharper before he pushed that memory away as well, closing his eye and nodding. They were his parents.

He would _probably_ still be welcomed home.

Before he could doubt his decision, he walked up to the door and knocked quickly. His ears pricked as he heard his father’s footsteps coming closer, pausing behind the door as he looked through the viewer. The sound of the door unlocking and being thrown open gave Deidara time to step back, both hands clenched around the strap of his bag.

“Hey,” Deidara nodded. “So, yeah,” he felt tears welling up in his eye. “This is going to sound crazy and I’m sorry I took so long to come talk to you, but—”

He was cut off as his father lunged forward and pulled him into his arms. “ _Deidara,”_ his name was practically sobbed out. The older man leaned back after a few seconds, holding Deidara at arms-length away from him so that he could see his face. “What _happened_ to you?” he let go and moved his hands up, pushing Deidara’s hair out of the way. “So many _scars_ …”

Pausing, Toshi Iwakawa turned and called back into the house. “Mira!”

Deidara, fully crying, turned his head to look at his mother when she appeared. Toshi took a step back, letting go of his son as his wife fairly launched herself out the door, wrapping her arms around Deidara. “My _son,_ ” she sobbed the words out, her knees giving out. She took Deidara with her when she fell, both of them landing on the ground.

Both of them crying.

The last time he had seen his parents, face to face, had been the morning of his disappearance. Nearly nine years had passed since then. Having spent almost six of them shifted into his wolf form, Deidara felt like he had been so far from home for ages. His father crouched down next to them, a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “We never stopped hoping,” he whispered.

“I wanted to come home,” Deidara could feel the oncoming breakdown and he hoped he could say what he wanted to say before it happened. “B-but there was the guy who attacked me, yeah. He—I—” he held out his hands, letting his dad take them both in his own. Letting his claws slide out, Deidara looked at the ground. “There were reasons, yeah. I couldn’t – I was dangerous at first and then he was hunting me and then I had to hide.” He could feel the hot trails of tears running down his face, the damaged nerves in his empty eye socket reacting as his body tried to use an eye that was no longer there.

“You came home,” Toshi nodded, tears in his eyes as well. “That is all that matters.”

“Where have you been staying?!” Mira’s head popped up, her crying coming to a sudden halt. “How have you been safe this entire time – where were you getting food?”

“Mom,” Deidara laughed. “ _Mom._ ”

He slid straight from laughter back into tears as he pulled her to him again, hiding his face in her shoulder.

Toshi wrapped his arms around both of them, holding them close.

It took them nearly twenty minutes, but eventually they stopped crying. “I’ve been taken care of, recently.” Deidara managed to say. “Met someone, they’ve been making sure I eat and get clothes and stuff, yeah.”

“Oh?” Toshi raised an eyebrow. “Who is this someone?” he looked up, studying their surroundings. “And where are they?”

“He couldn’t come,” Deidara stood up, helping his mother to her feet. “He’s still asleep right now. He won’t wake up for,” he pulled the phone Sasori had bought for him out of his pocket and checked the time. “About another six hours, yeah.” He looked at the sun for a second, then nodded. “Once the sun goes down, he might be up to coming over and meeting you.”

“A vampire?” Toshi looked almost suspicious. “Which one?”

“Akasuna Sasori,” Deidara grinned sheepishly, feeling like a teenager again. He’d actually missed being interrogated by his parents, which was something. “He’s the one who keeps werewolves from attacking people. He rehabilitates them, sort of. Takes them somewhere else if they want to go somewhere else, helps them shift back to human-shaped if he can.” He saw the look on his mother’s face. “I wasn’t attacking people, yeah.”

“So then why—”

“I was defending people from the guy that attacked me,” Deidara sighed. “I kept him from sending some werewolves into town that would have killed people.”

“Come inside and explain,” Toshi gestured towards the door. “Please.”

Mira took Deidara’s hand and smiled at him.

They walked inside as a family once more, Deidara tracing his fingers over everything familiar as he walked through the house.

He was with his family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you really think I'll leave Deidara with his parents? He has a home.
> 
> It's not with them, anymore.


	15. Resolved At The (Not An End)

The entire manor managed to feel empty with the loss of just one person.

Sasori sat in his armchair, a book he couldn’t concentrate on in his lap and a glass of blood on the side table. Somehow, in the five months since Deidara had come into his life, the werewolf had managed to make himself fill up the entire house. His loud voice and bright laughter were missing now, and Sasori hated it.

Had he read the emotions between them wrong?

He was trying not to be selfish – Deidara had, after all, gone to see his parents. For the first time since he had been turned into a werewolf, attacked and ripped apart, he had gone home. Sasori took a deep breath he didn’t really need as he flipped a couple of pages uselessly, the words passing under his gaze without actually being read.

But he had thought that they were going to be together. Deidara had said something about it and now he was doubting his memory. Maybe the werewolf had just meant they would keep in contact.

Deidara had laid claim to him, though.

_Fuck._

Standing up, Sasori pitched the book at the wall with all of his strength, listening to it hit the wall with a thud. It dropped to the floor, unaffected by the glare he leveled at it. Just as he was going to grab it and shove it back into the bookshelf, he heard footsteps down the hall. “Are you going to throw more books?”

Sasori turned his head and saw Deidara standing at the entrance to the room, his hand on the wall. “I thought you had gone home,” he shifted awkwardly, both hands clamped on the book with a force that would have been bruising on a human. “You were going to go home and be with your parents – I thought you were going to leave.”

“That’s the thing about leaving, yeah.” Deidara smiled. “I can come back.”

His smile faded, turning into a frown. “I can, yeah?”

“You can—” Sasori dropped the book onto his chair. “Yes. You can come back – as long as you want to.”

“Okay,” Deidara narrowed his eye at him. “Something is still not quite right with you. You’re still being weird.” He moved closer, resting his arms on the back of Sasori’s chair. “Did you think I was leaving forever?”

“I- Yes.”

“So that’s where the mistake is,” Deidara shook his head, then circled around the chair and put his hands on Sasori’s cheeks, dragging him closer until their lips connected. It was a little rough, jarring at the sudden contact, but Sasori leaned into it. “You’re an idiot if you think I’m leaving you,” Deidara said once the kiss was over, rolling his eye. “Did you think I was staying away? Why would you think that – you know I’m here for the long haul, right?”

“I thought you might have decided to stay with your parents.” Sasori looked down. “You went home.”

“I went home—” Deidara groaned, frustrated. “I went for a visit to the house I grew up in,” he shook his head. “You’re how old again – Sasori, you are over six-hundred years old. How is it that you don’t know that this is my home now, yeah?”

Sasori blinked, jerking his head up. “ _What?_ ”

“Too late to take it back, you brought me in, I’m your problem now.” Deidara laughed as Sasori’s jaw dropped open. “My idiot vampire, yeah.”

“I’m not an idiot—”

Deidara circled Sasori’s shoulders with his arms, smiling. His entire body was warm, heat coming off of him like a furnace. “Are you going to focus on that part of what I just said?” he leaned in, nudging their noses together. _“Mine._ ” He laughed again when Sasori knocked their foreheads together. “I nearly died for you, yeah. Too late to deny my existence in your life.”

“Far too late,” Sasori shook his head, his hands curling around Deidara’s hips.

He could feel Deidara’s pulse go quick for a moment before it slowed. “What did you think I was going to do?” Deidara nudged his chin into Sasori’s, huffing out a breath. He closed his eye, tucking his face into Sasori’s shoulder. “And what are we going to do about the other missing people, yeah?”

“We?”

“We.” Deidara pulled back from him. “They went missing for the same reason I did, yeah. Obito or Madara or whatever his name is, he took them. Probably.”

“We do need to find them,” Sasori put his hands over his face, rubbing at his eyes. His earlier panic seemed so little, now. So useless and inconsequential. Deidara had come back to him – That was a bit of a surprise – and he was happy for it. “They disappeared before you or after you and you are the only one to have made it back.”

“Yeah,” Deidara shoved his hair out of his face, exposing the scarred socket. “You said something about the police chief wanting to see me?”

“Ah,” Sasori snorted. “Yes.”

 

“So you’re the one who managed to come back.”

Sasori leaned over, taking Deidara’s hand in his as Tsunade walked into the room and sat down. Her hair was mussed, the tail of it pulled raggedly over one shoulder as she sorted through the files on her desk. Deidara raised an eyebrow as she stopped, sighed, and then looked at him. “How the hell, kid.”

“Well,” Deidara’s nose wrinkled. “I nearly died to do it, yeah.”

That had been one of the memories Deidara had gotten back, recently. Wandering through a maze of tunnels, hiding from someone. Obito – Madara? – had rung some bells when he had been shown a picture of the man. Beyond having been there when he was attacked, Deidara remembered seeing him behind glass.

Watching.

_Taking notes._

“Nearly died,” Tsunade stared at him, then shifted her gaze to Sasori. “Have you been telling him what you know about it?”

“Yeah,” Deidara nodded, squeezing Sasori’s hand. Sasori could feel the surge of panic, could tell Deidara was worried. He squeezed back, nodding as well.

“He has been giving me as much information as he can,” Sasori told her. “Between the trauma-induced memory loss and the memory loss associated with having been shifted for six years, he had a sizable chunk of his memories missing. Given therapeutic practices, I have helped him recover those memories.” He watched as her eyes slid, once again, to Deidara.

He knew who she was, who she had been once.

One of the Three.

An old legend, three people who had gained immortality for themselves. The Naga Sasori had sought help from, so long ago, had been one of them. The third was off in the world, somewhere.

“Thank you,” Tsunade spoke up again, dragging him out of his thoughts. “Sasori, I know I’ve asked a lot of you, but I need you to keep looking for the missing people,” she handed him a folder. “I contacted the families of the missing again – the two you asked me about are Nagato Uzumaki and Konan Amega. Nagato had his little cousin with him when he went missing,” she sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Nagato was seventeen when he went missing. His cousin was nine.”

“When did they disappear, yeah?” Deidara peered over Sasori’s shoulder, his eye narrowed as he read the file as well. Sasori shifted the pages obligingly, letting him look. “Oh.” Deidara’s nose wrinkled. “Nagato, AKA Pein, disappeared…Four years before me?”

“Yes,” Tsunade leaned back in her chair. “He would have been about twenty-one when you disappeared.”

“We’ll find them,” Sasori found himself saying, watching out of the corner of his eye as Deidara grinned at him.

Surprisingly, he wanted to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is that part. Sasori is becoming more social and it's Deidara's fault.
> 
> And yeah, we'll find out more about Nagato and his little cousin. It's coming.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the other project I've been working on! I came up with this AU when I was about fourteen and I just fell out of the fandom before I could write it. 
> 
> So now, with adult writing skills, I present my stereotypical vampire/werewolf AU. I hope you guys like it.


End file.
